]]>Jeffrey St. Clairhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889062016-12-09T23:53:08Z2016-12-09T09:11:50ZMore]]>Back in the 1990s, Alexander Cockburn and I coined a term for how the mainstream press goes about disclosing acts of government villainy that the newspapers had previously connived with or worked to conceal, and often both. We called this technique the “uncover-up.”

An uncover-up unfolds something like this. A human rights group alleges that the US government has actively sponsored the torture and assassination of priests and nuns in a Latin American country. The front pages of a national paper, say the Washington Post, furiously deny the reports, citing unnamed sources deep in the intelligence community that a review had taken place and determined that the charges are unsubstantiated rumors with no factual basis. The editorial pages of the same paper then smear the sources of the story as left-wing agitators, agents of subversion or paranoids.

Weeks go by. More evidence emerges: testimonials, photos, tape-recordings of screaming victims, American bootprints in the blood. Silence. And then after the initial fury has died down, somewhere in the nether regions of the paper the atrocities are quietly confirmed in sedate tones, never to be repeated and then solemnly filed away in the archives as “old news.”

In the matter of the Washington Post’s big scoop on how Vladimir Putin swung the recent election to his best bro Donald Trump by flooding more than 200 independent media sites in the US with propaganda and fake news, we are now witnessing a journalistic phenomenon we might call the casual “come down.”

Let’s recap the story to date. On Thanksgiving, the Washington Post splashed a huge story alleging that Putin’s Russia had used 200 independent media sites to infect the minds of at least 15 million Americans with Russian propaganda and disinformation. The story was written by the Post’s technology reporter, a man called Craig Timberg.

One of Timberg’s chief sources was a tenebrous outfit called PropOrNot, which had put together a spooky list of these “suspect” media outlets that it shared with Timberg, and some members of congress, before publishing. The censorious shadows behind PropOrNot only agreed to share their blacklist with Timberg on the condition that he conceal their identity. To his and his paper’s shame, Timberg indulged the demands of his secret sources. Who were these creeps? What was their methodology? What credibility, if any, should their blacklist have for the Post’s readers?

Timberg vouched for his sources, but why trust him? Who is Timberg? He isn’t just a “technology” reporter. As Russ and Pam Martens disclosed, Timberg had previously worked as deputy editor of the Post’s national security bureau and enjoys familial ties to some of the nastier creatures in the DC cloak-and-dagger scene, including Oliver North. Like many reporters who cover intelligence agencies as part of their daily beat, Timberg traffics in anonymous tips, off the record tips over drinks at DuPont Circle bars, anonymous nuggets from the gossip rooms of Langley and Foggy Bottom. More malevolently, intelligence reporters often serve (wittingly or unwittingly) as conduits for disinformation planted by intelligence agencies, politicians or other figures on what Dick Cheney immortalized as “the dark side.”

It wasn’t long before the floor buckled and the roof caved-in on Timberg’s exposé. The manifest flaws in his reporting have been effectively exposed by in-depth stories in The Intercept, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Extra!, AlterNet, and CounterPunch, among others. The piece was an over-hyped and factually-deficient story, constructed out of tissues of conjecture by nebulous and biased sources. For his part, Timberg didn’t even bother to contact the targets of PropOrNot’s smears. In other words, Timberg’s scoop violated almost every tenet of standard journalistic practice.

Then, alas for poor Timberg, his source collapsed, too. After CounterPunch contacted PropOrNot demanding that they remove us from their blacklist and issue a retraction and an apology, they wilted. There we were: menace to society one minute, deleted the next. Other websites also began to vanish from the blacklist, as mysteriously as they had appeared in the first place. Perhaps we’ll all be back on the proscribed list next week.

Did the smear artists behind PropOrNot consult with Timberg about these curious deletions? Did he contact them for an explanation? If so, he hasn’t seen fit to report back to his readers, assuming he has any readers left.

The Post’s lawyers, however, have been hard at work covering their reporter’s ass, especially after being hit with legal notices from several of Timberg’s targets, including Naked Capitalism and Truthdig. On Wednesday of this week, a note was discreetly tacked to the top of the online version of Timberg’s story, which reads as follows:

The Washington Post on Nov. 24 published a story on the work of four sets of researchers who have examined what they say are Russian propaganda efforts to undermine American democracy and interests. One of them was PropOrNot, a group that insists on public anonymity, which issued a report identifying more than 200 websites that, in its view, wittingly or unwittingly published or echoed Russian propaganda. A number of those sites have objected to being included on PropOrNot’s list, and some of the sites, as well as others not on the list, have publicly challenged the group’s methodology and conclusions. The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor did the article purport to do so. Since publication of The Post’s story, PropOrNot has removed some sites from its list.

This crafty bit of legerdemain is not a retraction or an apology, but a kind of legal mystification meant to distance the paper and its reporter from the damage they’ve inflicted, damage that can’t be undone. The Post put its credibility on the line when it agreed to quote the spectral figures behind PropOrNot as an anonymous source, investing these sinister individuals with the allure and gravitas of Deep Throat.

In short, PropOrNot is itself “prop.” And the Washington Post’s big story is fake news, a fabulation as grand as any story by Janet Cooke or Jayson Blair. But unlike Cooke and Blair (both black and both fired immediately after discovery of their faked sources), this was shoddy journalism with a political purpose. It was written in venom with the intent to harm and destroy and apparently still enjoys the full-backing of the paper’s editors and publisher, Jeff Bezos.

But the gig is up. Timberg and the Post can’t now claim plausible deniability for their hit piece–not while the ink from their smears is still fresh on their hands. We’re not going to let them get away with it. Not in this climate of manufactured hysteria. Not ever.

***

+ My friend John Bellamy Foster is one of the finest sociologists and environmental historians in the world. John lives about 95 miles south of me in Eugene, where he is a professor at the University of Oregon and the author of many excellent books, including The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. John is also editor of the venerable and indispensable Monthly Review.

Foster has recently been targeted by the latest rightwing witch hunt for profit, an enterprise masquerading under the name The Professor Watchlist. These little goons in bow-ties have smeared Foster as a professor of dangerous leftwing ideas such as the–brace yourself–“socialization of nature.” John has been put through this slanderous and unnerving form of harassment before, having been targeted by the sleazy David Horowitz in his 2006 book of McCarthyite trash The 101 Most Dangerous Professors.

The PropOrNot blacklist of media sites and the Professor Watchlist represent the first wave of the new nastiness. The old Red Scare has never really gone away. It lies dormant for a while and then remerges in even more toxic incarnations.

Here’s a note John sent to his colleagues describing the darkening clouds enveloping academia in the age of Trump.

Dear Colleagues,

This is no game. We are a different period. I have not yet seen the environmental sociology discussion on this, but I am a PEWS, Environmental Sociology, and Marxist Theory section member (a former head of the section) and I am on the list. I believe I am the only one on the list in this region (the Pacific Northwest). In my case I am on it because of the Horowitz Dangerous Professors List of a decade ago, where I was listed. The Professor Watchlist has taken over the statements by Horowitz there word for word, I believe, but now it is more serious. There is a University of Oregon Chapter of the Professor Watchlist established over the last week and I am the principal target. Next week an NPR affiliated local radio station will be interviewing the head of the Chapter in a call-in show, where that individual will no doubt pinpoint me as the local rotten apple and use that as a weapon for threatening other professors. One of my sins is to be editor of Monthly Review. I have been asked to do a separate, “adjacent” interview on the same station, in which I will be able to respond.

Here we have to learn from history. The key to developing a coherent response is the Einstein First Amendment Strategy from 1953 developed in the midst of the McCarthy Era (the initial attempt to use the First in the case of the Hollywood Ten failed) in which Einstein declared that there should be determined non-cooperation and that the goal should be to use the First to attack the inquisition itself. His letter appeared in the NYT in June 1953 and let writers Leo Huberman and Harvey O’Connor, and then Corliss Lamont, Lilian Hellman, and Paul Sweezy, all of whom were closely connected, and linked to Albert Einstein and MR, put it into practice in a succession of attempts to break McCarthyism.

Sweezy was the most successful because he refused to turn over his lecture notes and to name names and they hit him with contempt of court and consigned him to county jail and he fought it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Things are obviously not at that critical state yet (we are not talking about subpoenas and prosecutions with possible imprisonment at the moment), though there are calls to reestablish the House on Un-American Activities Committee.

But I think that the Einstein strategy is what we need to adopt from the start. If such a stance is taken from the beginning we may be able to head off further disasters. There should no arguing of specifics of charges, rather freedom of speech and academic freedom and challenging the goon squads should be everything. You might want to familiarize yourself with the U.S. Supreme Court Decision Sweezy v. New Hampshire of 1957. You can find it online under its case number (354 U.S. 234).

Welcome to Gleichschaltung.

Yours,

John Bellamy Foster

Perhaps this is just the excuse you needed to finally subscribe to Monthly Review.

***

+ In Nicolai Gogol’s 1842 masterpiece, Dead Souls, a disgraced bureaucrat named Chichikov, who has been fired for corruption, goes from town to town across the vast Russian steppe, buying up the souls of dead serfs, which he hopes to profit from in a mad scheme that prefigures the deal-making of modern day arbitragers.

Now we have our very own Chichikov in the figure of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who in a speech to CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee) last week, said that the programs which provide poor children (America’s serfs-in-training) with free school lunches leave them with “empty souls” and should thus be terminated.

This is, of course, a textbook case of Freudian projection, where Ryan displaces his own vacuous moral character onto the defenseless kids he is about to screw over for his own political enrichment. Make America Great Again: Starve the Children!

+ Like those occasional corrections buried in the New York Times, the media’s new obsession with “fake news” is a way to make their own reporting seem more legitimate.

+ Some of my friends on what might loosely be described as the anti-interventionist right look at the Trump cabinet and see a gathering of peaceniks. (Of course, some of these people also thought the invasion of Grenada was a rescue operation.) When I look at Mattis, Flynn and Pompeo, I see a cabal of fanatics who are gearing up to go to war against Iran with the same fervency that charged the Bushies’ mad drive to take down Saddam.

Cockburn and I used to run a little betting game called First Blood. The goal was to pick the number of days it would take for a new president to launch his first lethal bombing raid or missile strike. Generally, it took less than a month. I give Trump two days.

Of course, in the age of drones the kill order can come in a matter of seconds and, unless Trump decides to target an American journalist on book tour in France, we might not know about the carnage for weeks.

+ Make way for the Burgereoisie! Trump is nominating fast food czar, Andy Puzder, for Secretary of Labor. Puzder is a vicious piece of work, who is a rabid opponent of almost aspiration of working people, from living wages to health care to safe working conditions. Aside from pushing piles of grease and sugar water down the throats of American consumers, Puzder is also a sexist troglodyte, who defended the soft meat porn advertising for his Carl’s Jr. franchise by saying: “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s very American.”

Note the revelatory syntax: “burgers in bikinis.” Apparently, the “Bikini Burger” was specially designed for his pal Trump, so that the Donald could eat his favorite food and feel as if he’s “grabbing some pussy” at the same time.

+ Dr. Ben Carson believes that housing for the poor is a malicious form of socialist coddling and indoctrination. His first act as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development will be to rename his agency the Department of Tent Cities and Sidewalks.

+ First Trump tapped Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn for his National Security Advisor, then Lt. Gen. Mad Dog Mattis for Defense Secretary, followed by Gen. John Kelly to head the Department of Homeland Security. I guess we are soon to find out exactly how many generals can dance on the point of a Pinhead.

+ Over the last 35 years, the American economy has almost doubled in size. But nearly all of that growth has been seized by the top two percent of wage earners. More than 50 percent of working Americans have experienced no growth in their wealth at all. These are the wages of Clinton/Obama neoliberal economics at work. Trump will almost certainly exacerbate these trends. But who among us could rationalize more of the same?

+ Trump’s poll numbers have reached an all-time high, breaking the 50 percent favorability threshold for the first time, largely because of the press’s slavish coverage of the ridiculous deal Mike Pence cut to bribe Carrier into a keeping a few jobs in Indiana, which will soon be wiped out by automation. Trump’s numbers will soar even higher once he brings in some Vegas showgirls to help him announce the weekly Powerball numbers Live From the Oval Office! Powerball, of course, is what Trump is planning to use to replace Social Security, Medicare and School Lunches.

+ Trump’s circle of scavengers is drooling at the prospect of privatizing Indian reservations that have reserves of oil, gas, coal and minerals. This would signal a return to the horrid termination policy of the 20th century, when treaties and tribal status were simply nullified with a stroke of the executive pen. Resistance will be fierce. But everything is a real estate deal to these jerks.

+ A new poll suggests that nearly half of all Americans now support torture. Let’s see how they feel six months from now after the new Congress allows bill collectors to use waterboarding to extract their monthly payments…

+ The ashes of Fidel Castro were entombed in a boulder this week. The stone reads only Fidel. He needed no other description. Fidel was the anti-Trump: “Fidel was always against the cult of personality until his dying days,” said Raul Castro, a couple of days after the funeral. “He was consistent with that attitude, insisting that after his death his name and figure never be used to name plazas, avenues, streets and other public places, as well as the building of statues.”

The Cuban government presented a bill to the National Assembly, which will forbid the use of Fidel’s name and image on monuments and in other public places.

+ Law professor Jonathan Turley reports that years of manipulating the rules of the senate, especially with the so-called “nuclear option” weakening the power of the filibuster, will now come back to limit the Democrats’ ability to block some of Trump’s most noxious appointments and policies. No procedural viagra will stiffen Democratic “resistance” now. They’ll have to find a way to do it all on their own.

+ A couple of hundred miles from Standing Rock, the Belle Fouche Pipeline ruptured, gushing oil into Ash Coulee Creek in North Dakota. Leak is what pipelines do, unless they are transporting natural gas in which case they leak then explode.

+ The New York Times reports that pr0-Trump students are feeling under siege on campuses across the country and are demanding “safe spaces.” But can’t all of these trembling little fascists just bunker down together in the School of Business?

+ Kathy McMorris Rodgers, nemesis of all living creatures great and small, is Trump’s pick for Interior Secretary. I have it on good authority that her husband snores like a chainsaw. It’s what attracted her to him…

+ Rejecting Ralph Nader’s advice that he divest himself of all potential financial entanglements, Donald Trump will remain Executive Producer (ka-ching!) of “Celebrity Apprentice” when it returns to the air next year. The big question: which cabinet member will Trump fire first live on TV? Ben Carson or Andy Puzder?

+ I caught some scenes from “Taxi Driver” again last night. As you might recall, Travis Bickle becomes obsessed with Cybill Shepard, who works for the liberal New York senator and presidential candidate Charles Palantine, a blending of RFK and John Lindsay. His rival is a conservative named Goodwin. Goodwin’s campaign motto: “A Return to Greatness.” So, on the long list of culprits to blame for the rise of Trump we can now inscribe the name of Marty Scorcese and his screenwriter Paul Schrader.

+ By day Emily toiled as the Pistachio Girl for the Philadelphia Phillies, by night she consorted with White Nationalists. But perhaps her nutritional guidance was still sound? If so, just remember, when you go out on a long night of cross-burning, there’s nothing quite like the refreshing taste of roasted pistachios and a flagon of Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier to get you safely across some of the rougher lawns in South Philly. Auf weidersehen, Emily! But before you go, one last word of advice, please: can we safely compost those tiny shells?

Guy Debord: “The status of celebrity offers the promise of being showered with ‘all good things’ that capitalism has to offer. The grotesque display of celebrity lives (and deaths) is the contemporary form of the cult of personality; those ‘famous for being famous’ hold out the spectacular promise of the complete erosion of an autonomously lived life in return for an apotheosis as an image. The ideological function of celebrity (and lottery systems) is clear – like a modern ‘wheel of fortune’ the message is ‘all is luck; some are rich, some are poor, that is the way the world is…it could be you!”

— The Society of the Spectacle

]]>Henry Girouxhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889872016-12-09T21:36:46Z2016-12-09T09:03:16ZMore]]>
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump made it clear that he liked the uneducated and that once he assumed the presidency, he would appoint a range of incompetent people to high ranking positions that would insure that many people remain poorly educated, illiterate, and impoverished. A few examples make the point. Betsy DeVos, the nominee for Secretary of Education is a multi-millionaire, has no experience in higher education, supports for-profit charter schools, and is a strong advocate for private school vouchers. Without irony, she has described her role in education as one way to “advance God’s kingdom.”[1] She is anti-union, and her motto for education affirms Trump’s own educational philosophy to “defund, devalue, and privatize.”[2]

Ben Carson, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has never run a federal agency and has no experience in government, policy making, or in public housing and has described housing policy pejoratively as a form of social engineering and a socialist experiment. New York City council member and chair of the city’s Housing and Buildings Committee described Carson’s appointment as “ill-advised, irresponsible and hovers on absurdity.”[3] Carson will run a $48 billion agency that oversees public housing and ensures that low-income families have access to housing that is safe and affordable. He believes people can escape from poverty through hard work alone and has argued that government regulations resemble forms of totalitarian rule comparable to what existed in communist countries.[4]

Andrew F. Puzder, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Labor, has less experience in government “than any secretary since the early 1980s.”[5] He is a critic of worker protections, opposes raising the minimum wage, and appears to share Trump’s disparaging views of women. As the New York Times pointed out, the advertisements that Mr. Pusder’s companies run “promote its restaurants frequently feature women wearing next to nothing while gesturing suggestively.”[6] When asked about the ads, Mr. Puzder replied “I like our ads. I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s is very American.”[7] I am sure Trump, the unchecked misogynist, agrees.

It is hard to believe that this gaggle of religious fundamentalists, conspiracy theory advocates, billionaires, and retrograde anti-communists, who uniformly lack the experience to take on the jobs for which they were nominated, could possibly be viewed as reasonable candidates for top government positions. As Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) cited in The Hill observed “most of Trump’s appointees are “The greatest collection of stooges and cronies and misfits we have ever seen in a presidential administration….Some of these people’s only qualifications for the jobs they are being appointed for is that they have attempted to dismantle and undermine and destroy the very agencies they are now hoping to run.”[8]

What these appointments suggest is that one element of the new authoritarianism is a deep embrace of ignorance, anti-intellectualism, crony capitalism, and a disdain for the institutions that give legitimacy to the social contract and the welfare state. Most of Trump’s appointees to top cabinet positions are a mix of incompetent and mean spirited billionaires and generals. This alliance of powerful representatives of predatory financial capitalists and right-wing supporters of the immense military-industrial-surveillance complex makes clear Trump’s support of the worst elements of neoliberalism—a war on education, support for austerity policies, and an attack on social provisions, the poor, workers, unions, and the most vulnerable. As Eric Sommer wrote in CounterPunch, “These ministerial level cabinet selections are a warning that far greater attacks on the social and economic rights of American workers, and greater militarism and military aggression abroad are being prepared.”[9] Trump’s affirmation of an updated version of the Gilded Age and his attempts to accelerate America’s slide into authoritarianism is an assault on reason, compassion, morality, and human dignity. Its underside is a political mix of militarism and rule by the financial elite, both of which are central features of a savage neoliberal assault on democracy. Trump’s government of billionaires and militarists makes clear that the next few years will be governed by ruthless financial elite who will give new meaning to a war culture that will impose forms of domestic terrorism across a wide swath of American society.

Thus far, Trump has appointed three generals to join his cabinet—James Mattis and Michael Flynn for Secretary of Defense and National Security Advisor, along with Retired General John Kelly to head the Department of Homeland Security. Kelly is infamous for defending the force-feeding of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and wants to expand the prison population there. Retired General Mattis, whose nickname is “Mad Dog,” stated in 2003, the year that Iraq was invaded, that “It’s fun to shoot some people, you know, it’s a hell of a hoot.”[10] He once told marines under his command “Be polite. Be professional. But have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”[11] As difficult as it is to imagine it gets worse. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s choice for national security advisor considers Islam, with its population of 1.3 billion, a terrorist threat. He has also used the social media to spread fake news stories “linking Mrs. Clinton to underage sex rings and other serious crimes [while pushing] unsubstantiated claims about Islamic laws spreading in the United States.”[12] At work here is an emerging political-social formation in which fake news becomes an accepted mode of shaping public discourse, inexperience and incompetence become revered criteria for holding public office, and social responsibility is removed from any vestige of politics. All of these appointments point to the emergence of a new political order in which the dystopian fears of George Orwell and Aldus Huxley are merged with the comic grotesquery of the tyrannical systems lampooned by the Marx brothers.

Under the reign of right-wing governments and social movements spreading throughout the world, thinking has become dangerous. Increasingly, neoliberal regimes across Europe and North America have waged a major assault on critical education and the public spheres in which they take place. For instance, public and higher education are being defunded, turned into accountability factories, and now largely serve as adjuncts of an instrumental logic that mimics the values of a business culture. But, of course, this is not only true for spaces in which formal schooling takes place, it is also the case for those public spheres and cultural apparatuses producing knowledge, values, subjectivities, and identities through a range of media and sites. This applies to a range of creative spaces including art galleries, museums, diverse sites that make up screen culture, and various elements of mainstream media.[13]

Such sites have come under increasing fire since the 1970s and the war against dissident journalism, in particular, will intensify under a Trump presidency. Attacking the media was a central feature of Trump’s presidential campaign speaks to a coming age of repression, posing a dire threat to freedom of speech. As, Christopher Hass, observes “But more importantly, he threatened to ‘open up’ libel laws so that he and others can more easily sue publications that are critical of them. Those kinds of attacks are designed to burn money and hours that independent publications don’t have-and sometimes they can be fatal.”[14]What the apostles of neoliberalism have learned is that alternative media outlets along with diverse forms of cultural production can change how people view the world, and that such forms of public pedagogy can be dangerous because they hold the potential for not only creating critically engaged students, intellectuals, and artists but can strengthen and expand the general publics’ imagination, give them critical tools to enable them to think otherwise in order to act otherwise, and hold power accountable. Such thinking is also a prerequisite for developing social movements willing to rethink the vision and tactics necessary to fight against an authoritarian state.

In the face of Trump’s draconian assault on democracy, it is crucial to rethink mechanisms of a repressive politics not only by highlighting its multiple registers of economic power, but also through the ideological pedagogical mechanisms at work in creating modes of agency, identities, and values that both mimic and surrender to authoritarian ideologies and social practices. In this instance, education as it works through diverse institutions, cultural apparatuses, and sites is crucial to both understand and appropriate as part of the development of a radical politics. Reclaiming radical pedagogy as a form of educated and militant hope begins with the crucial recognition that education is not solely about job training and the production of ethically challenged entrepreneurial subjects but is primarily about matters of civic literacy, critical thinking, and the capacity for liberatory change. It is also inextricably connected to the related issues of power, inclusion, and social responsibility.[15] If young people, workers, educators, and others are to develop a keen sense of the common good, as well as an informed notion of community engagement, pedagogy must be viewed as a cultural, political, and moral force, if not formative culture, that provides the knowledge, values, and social relations to make such democratic practices possible.

In this instance, pedagogy as a central element of politics needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom and liberation for the most vulnerable and oppressed. It must also cultivate a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, stretching the imagination, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles into public issues. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must overcome the image of education as purely instrumental, a dead zone of the imagination, and a normalized space of oppressive discipline and imposed conformity.

A neoliberal and anti-democratic pedagogy of management and conformity not only undermines the critical knowledge and analytical skills necessary for students to learn the practice of freedom and assume the role of critical agents, it also reinforces deeply authoritarian practices while reproducing deep inequities in the educational opportunities that different students acquire. Pedagogies of repression and conformity impose punishing forms of discipline not just on students, but on the general public, deadening their ability to think critically; how else to explain the refusal of large segments of the public to think through and challenge the lies, misrepresentations, and contradictions that Trump used during his campaign. Repressive forms of public pedagogy empty out politics of any substance and further a modern day pandemic of loneliness and alienation. Such pedagogies emphasize aggressive competition, unchecked individualism, and cancel out empathy for an exaggerated notion of self-interest. Solidarity and sharing are the enemy of these pedagogical practices, which are driven by a withdrawal from sustaining public values, trust, and goods and serve largely to cancel out a democratic future for young people. This type of pedagogical tyranny poses a particular challenge for progressives who are willing to acknowledge that the crisis of politics and economics has not been matched by a crisis of ideas, resulting in new age of authoritarianism.

A new age of monstrosities is emerging that necessitates that we rethink the connection between politics and democracy, on the one hand, and education and social change on the other. More specifically, we might begin with the following questions: What institutions, agents, and social movements can be developed capable of challenging the dark times ahead? Moreover, what pedagogical conditions need to be exposed and overcome in order to create the formative culture that would make such a challenge successful? Even thinking such questions becomes difficult in a time of growing pessimism and despair.

Domination is at its most powerful when its mechanisms of control and subjugation hide in the discourse of common sense, and its elements of power are made to appear invisible. Yet, progressives in a wide variety of sites can take up the challenge of not only relating their specialties and modes of cultural production to the intricacies of everyday life but also to rethink how politics works, and how power is central to such a task. Bruce Robbins articulates the challenge well in both his defense of making the pedagogical more political and his defense of struggles waged on the educational front and his reference to how theorists such as Foucault provide a model for such work. He writes:

But I also thought that intellectuals should be trying, like Foucault, to relate our specialized knowledge to things in general. We could not just become activists focused on particular struggles or editors striving to help little magazines make ends meet. We also had a different kind of role to play: thinking hard, as Foucault did, about how best to understand the ways power worked in our time. Foucault, like Sartre and Sontag and Said, was an intellectual, even at some points despite himself. He helped us understand the world in newly critical and imaginative ways. He offered us new lines of reasoning while also engaging in activism and political position-taking.[16]

Power is fundamental to any discourse about education and raises critical questions about what role education should play in a democracy and what role academics, artists, and other cultural workers might assume in order to address important social issues, in part, through the liberatory functions of education. This would suggest not only a relentless critique of dominant discourses, social practices, and policies, but also the need to engage in collective attempts to invent a new way of doing politics. Those concerned about the future of democracy have to rethink how power informs, shapes, and can be resourceful in both understanding and challenging power under the reign of global neoliberalism. This is especially true at a time in which a full scale attack is being waged by the Trump administration and other neoliberal societies on the public good, social provisions, and the welfare state.

Educators and other cultural workers should consider being more forceful, if not committed, to linking their overall politics to modes of critique and collective action that address the presupposition that democratic societies are never too just or just enough, and such a recognition means that a society must constantly nurture the possibilities for self-critique, collective agency, and forms of citizenship in which people play a fundamental role in critically discussing, administrating and shaping the material relations of power and ideological forces that bear down on their everyday lives. This is particularly important at a time when ignorance provides a sense of community; the brain has migrated to the dark pit of the spectacle and the only discourse that matters is about business. Trump has legitimated a spirit of ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and corruption. Thought now chases after emotions that obliterate it and actions are no longer framed against any viable notion of social responsibility.

At stake here is the task, as Jacques Derrida insists, of viewing the project of democracy as a promise, a possibility rooted in an ongoing struggle for economic, cultural, and social justice.[17] Democracy in this instance is not a sutured or formalistic regime, it is the site of struggle itself. The struggle over creating an inclusive and just democracy can take many forms, offers no political guarantees, and provides an important normative dimension to politics as an ongoing process of democratization that never ends. Such a project is based on the realization that a democracy that is open to exchange, question, and self-criticism never reaches the limits of justice.

Theorists such as Raymond Williams and Cornelius Castoriadis recognized that the crisis of democracy was not only about the crisis of culture but also the crisis agency, values, and education. Progressives and others who refuse to equate capitalism and democracy would do well to take account of the profound transformations taking place in the public sphere and reclaim pedagogy as a central category of politics itself. Pierre Bourdieu was right when he stated that cultural workers have too often “underestimated the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front.”[18] He goes on to say in a later conversation with Gunter Grass that “left intellectuals must recognize that the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion. Important to recognize that intellectuals bear an enormous responsibility for challenging this form of domination.”[19] These are important pedagogical interventions and imply rightly that pedagogy in the broadest sense is not just about understanding, however critical, but also provides the conditions, ideals, and practices necessary for assuming the responsibilities we have as citizens to expose human misery and to eliminate the conditions that produce it. Matters of responsibility, social action, and political intervention do not simply develop out of the practice of social criticism but also arise through forms of self-critique. The relationship between knowledge and power, on the one hand, and education and politics, on the other, should always be self-reflexive about its effects, how it relates to the larger world, whether or not it is open to new understandings, and what it might mean pedagogically to take seriously matters of individual and social responsibility. Any viable understanding of the artist and educator as a public intellectual must begin with the recognition that democracy begins to fail and civic life becomes impoverished when power is relegated to the realm of common sense and critical thinking is no longer viewed as central to politics itself. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency is a case study in how politics has been emptied of any substance and civic illiteracy has been normalized. Trump’s claim that he loves the uneducated appears to have paid off for him just as his victory makes clear that ignorance rather than reason, emotion rather than informed judgment, and the threat of violence rather than critical exchange appear to have more currency in the current historical moment.

This political tragedy ushered in with Trump’s election signifies the failure of the American public to recognize the educative nature of how agency is constructed, to address the necessity for moral witnessing, and the need to create a formative culture that produces critically engaged and socially responsible citizens. Realty-TV bombast and celebrity culture confers enormous authority in America and in doing so empties civil society and democracy of any meaning. Neoliberalism’s culture of consumerism, immediate satisfaction, and unchecked individualism both infantilizes and depoliticizes. The election of Donald Trump cannot simply be dismissed as an eccentric and dark moment in the history of American politics. His election proves that collective self-delusion can be dangerous when the spaces for critical learning, dissent, and informed judgment begin to whither or disappear altogether.

As Trump’s presidency gets underway, the neoliberalism’s hired intellectuals and celebrity pundits have already ushered in a discourse that will increasing normalize the regime of a dangerous demagogue, glossing over the ideological, economic, and religious fundamentalists he has chosen to fill top government positions. Such actions represent more than a flight from political and social responsibility, they also represent a surrender to the dark forces of authoritarianism. Dierdre Fulton, a writer for The Nation, is right in arguing that the process of normalization has already begun since Trump election. She writes:

Oprah Winfrey, in an interview with Entertainment Tonight, said Trump’s recent visit to the White House gave her ‘hope’ and suggested he has been ‘humbled’ by the experience,’ Johnson wrote. ‘The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins told his readers to ‘calm down’ and that Trump wasn’t the ‘worst thing.’ His colleague, Nouriel Roubini, insisted the Oval Office will ‘tame’ Trump. People magazine ran a glowing profile of Trump and his wife Melania (though a former People writer accused Trump of sexual assault). The New York Times’ Nick Kristof dubiously added that we should ‘Grit our teeth and give Trump a chance.’ The mainstays —Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN—while frequently critical, are covering Trump’s transition as they would any other.[20]

Democracy should be a way of thinking about education in a variety of spheres and practices, one that thrives on connecting equity to excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of the public good.[21] The question regarding what role education should play in democracy becomes all the more urgent at a time when the dark forces of authoritarianism are being normalized in the mainstream media. Central to such a discourse are hidden structures of critique and power attempting to normalize a full-frontal attack on public values, trust, solidarities, and modes of liberatory education. As such, the discourses of hate, humiliation, rabid self-interest, and greed are exercising a poisonous influence in many Western societies. This is most evident at the present moment in the discourse of the right-wing extremists vying to consolidate their authority within a Trump presidency, all of whom sanction a war on immigrants, women, young people, poor Black youth, and so it goes. One consequence is that democracy is on life support. This is all the more reason to take the late Edward Said’s call for modes of social criticism designed “to uncover and elucidate the contest, to challenge and defeat both an imposed silence and the normalized quiet of unseen power, wherever and whenever possible.” Yet, in spite of the dark forces now threatening many societies around the globe, it is crucial for intellectuals, artists and others to renounce any form of normalization of power, the toxic public pedagogies of neoliberalism, and to take on radical democracy as both a pedagogical project and unfinished ideal. Such a challenge will be all the easier if progressives and others can create the pedagogical conditions that can produce an individual and collective sense of moral and political outrage, a new understanding of politics, and the pedagogical and projects needed to allow democracy to breathe once again.

Trump’s presence in American politics has made visible a plague of deep seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system, and a contempt for reason; it also points to the withering of civic attachments, the collapse of politics into the spectacle of celebrity culture, the decline of public life, the use of violence and fear to numb people into shock, and a willingness to transform politics into a pathology. Trump’s administration will produce a great deal of violence in American society, particularly among the ranks of the most vulnerable: poor children, minorities of color, immigrants, women, climate change advocates, Muslims, and those protesting a Trump presidency. What must be made clear is that Trump’s election and the damage he will do to American society will stay and fester in American society for quite some time because he is only symptomatic of the darker forces that have been smoldering in American politics for the last 40 years. What cannot be exaggerated or easily dismissed is that Trump is the end result of a long standing series of attacks on democracy and that his presence in the American political landscape has put democracy on trial. While mass civil demonstrations have and continue to erupt over Trump’s election, what is more crucial to understand is that something more serious needs to be addressed. We have to acknowledge that at this particular moment in American history the real issue is not simply about resisting Donald Trump’s insidious values and anti-democratic policies but whether a political system can be reclaimed in which a notion of radical democracy can be deepened, strengthened and sustained. Yet, under a Trump presidency, it will be more difficult to sustain, construct, and nurture those public spheres that sustain critique, informed dialogue, and a work to expand the radical imagination. If democracy is to prevail in and through the threat of “dark times,” it is crucial that the avenues of critique and possibility become central to any new understanding of politics. If the authoritarianism of the Trump era is to be challenged, it must begin with a politics that is comprehensive in its attempts to understand the intersectionality of diverse forces of oppression and resistance. That is, on the one hand, it must move towards developing analyses that address the existing state of authoritarianism through a totalizing lens that brings together the diverse registers of oppression and how they are both connected and mutually reinforce each other. On the other hand, such a politics must, as Robin D.G. Kelley has noted, “move beyond stopgap alliances”[22] and work to unite single issue movements into a more comprehensive and broad-based social movement that can make a viable claim to a resistance that is as integrated as it is powerful. For too long progressive cultural workers and activists have adhered to a narrative about domination that relies mostly on remaking economic structures and presenting to the public what might be called a barrage of demystifying facts and an aesthetics of transgression. What they have ignored is that people also internalize oppression and that domination is about not only the crisis of economics, images that deaden the imagination, and the misrepresentation of reality, but also about the crisis of agency, identification, meaning, and desire.

The crisis of economics and politics in the Trump era has not been matched by a crisis of consciousness and agency. The failure to develop a crisis of consciousness is deeply rooted in a society that suffers from a plague of atomization, loneliness, and despair. Neoliberalism has undermined any democratic understanding of freedom limiting its meaning to the dictates of consumerism, hatred of government, and a politics where the personal is the only emotional referent that matters. Freedom has collapsed into the dark abyss of a vapid and unchecked individualism and in doing so has cancelled out that capacious notion of freedom rooted in the bonds of solidarity, compassion, social responsibility, and the bonds of social obligations. The toxic neoliberal combination of unchecked economic growth is a discourse that legitimates plundering the earths’ resources and exhibits a pathological disdain for community and public values that has weakened democratic pressures, values, and social relations and opened the door for the dark side of politics under Donald Trump’s Presidency. The rule of the billionaires and militarists threaten not just democracy but the existence of the planet. The stakes for both justice, if not survival, are more important than ever. There is no room for resignation, internecine squabbles, and despair. Resistance must take on the challenge of creating an informed public, the need to develop new forms of non-violent resistance, and mobilize a collective sense of outrage mixed with a need for disciplined and focus action.

Pressing the claim for social justice and economic equality means working hard to develop alternative modes of consciousness, promote the proliferation of democratic public spheres, create the conditions for modes of mass resistance, and make the development of sustainable social movements central to any viable struggle for economic, political, and social justice. No viable democracy can exist without citizens who value and are willing to work towards the common good. That is as much a pedagogical question as it is a political challenge.

In the days leading up to his Inauguration, and then for several months after that, Obamaphilia was in the air. By the summer of 2009, the fumes and vapors had mostly cleared out, but a residue lingered on.

A diluted version still lingers; witness the zeal of liberal NGOs and Democratic Party “outreach” operations sending birthday cards and thank you notes to the Obamas – to both of them because Michelle is, by now, the more popular of the two.

But, of course, what the terminally addled Sarah Palin called “that hope and change thingee” didn’t quite work out.

Running against Mitt Romney, a cartoon version of a Republican grandee who had unconditionally surrendered to the Tea Party, Obama won again in 2012. By then, however, nobody expected much good to come of it.

Thus the last time there was a President-elect who had gotten large numbers of voters’ juices flowing, disillusionment set in slowly. With Donald Trump, it will be swift.

It will be bitter and nasty too. Many, maybe most, Trump voters voted for the billionaire buffoon to send a message to the various “establishments” or just because they couldn’t abide Hillary Clinton.

But there were also distressingly many Trump voters who really are “deplorable,” just as Clinton said. She exaggerated their numbers, and there is little doubt that she would have been better off keeping her mouth shut. But she wasn’t wrong.

Unless, as President, Trump is even more pernicious than he has so far seemed to be, or unless he cedes power to his most vile appointees, or unless his egotism spins out of control, those deplorables could turn out to be even more dangerous than he.

It may take them a while to realize it, but Trump has been treating them, along with all the other people who voted for him, as chumps.

If media reports are on point, some of them are already starting to figure out that they have been suckered. But with the Inauguration still more than six weeks off, the vast majority are still cutting the Donald slack. Having defeated the devil they knew too well, they are adopting a wait and see attitude towards the devil they latched onto.

When liberals cut Obama slack, it was because they believed in his essential goodness; no need for a peace movement while he was calling the shots – evidence notwithstanding.

Trump supporters are similarly deluded — except that what they believe in is not their man’s goodness; they know as well as anyone that he is a badass. What they believe in is his (magical) ability to restore outsourced jobs and to “make America great again,” whatever that means.

Sooner or later, most likely sooner, most of them will figure out that what they voted for is not what they got; that, in key respects, it is just the opposite. When they do, expect them to lash out. There will be hell to pay.

Their disillusionment will harm Trump and the Trump brand, but probably not right away. At first, the usual victims, the vulnerable communities whose wellbeing and security Trump’s campaign put in jeopardy, will bear the brunt.

Now they are suffering because Trump’s most nativist, racist and Islamophobic supporters are feeling empowered; it will be worse when disillusionment sets in.

Obviously, it makes no sense to blame everyone who is not white, straight, male (or female, but like-minded), Christian (or rabidly Zionist), and long in the tooth for Trump’s bait and switch.

But, then very little has made sense ever since, to everyone’s astonishment, the Donald’s efforts to turn the American political scene into a real world facsimile of a reality TV show transformed the 2016 election into a farce – and a cash cow for network and cable TV executives.

***

That there would be a bait and switch was inevitable, once Trump won. It seems unexpected only because, thinking Trump would lose, nobody gave it much thought.

Even Trump seemed surprised that he won. Perhaps someday, he or his children will write a book, or have one written for them, that will tell what prompted him to run for President in the first place.

Did he really believe that, as President, he would do his country some good? In other words, did he dupe himself? Or was it that he is so taken with himself that he thought the highest office in the land his due? No doubt, there were many motives jumbled together, but I suspect that, he being Trump, the main factor was commercial; the huckster just wanted to boost his brand.

Whatever got him in, he ought to have gotten out while there was still time, before he would find himself so far in above his head that he would be unable to bluster his way out.

But, for that, he would have had to know what is good for him, and to have been strong willed enough to act on that knowledge. There was no way that would happen. The man is monumentally blind to his shortcomings and disabilities, and unable to resist his egotistical urges. Moreover, the bully couldn’t stand to lose – especially to a girl and, as if that weren’t bad enough, to one he knew to be inept.

And so, he got swept away by the adoration of the crowds that decades of mounting anger at the Clintonite (neoliberal) status quo, fueled by billions of dollars worth of free media publicity, brought to his rallies.

Were he a tad less taken with himself, it might have occurred to him that he knew nothing and cared less about governance. He might also have realized that, coming out of the campaign, no one respectable would work with him, and that he would therefore have no choice but to throw himself on the mercy of the GOP, the party he nearly destroyed.

And so, the rats are running back onto the ship they thought was sinking. The Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio fans, and the always-biddable Mitt Romney, have all come begging for jobs.

What a pathetic spectacle! And how humiliating too for the Donald!

After defying all odds by beating back the Clinton juggernaut, he will find himself turning the government over to two old school Republican mediocrities, Reince Preibus, his Chief of Staff, and Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House – and to the reactionaries they will recruit to colonize the deep state.

Perhaps this is what he always wanted in his heart of hearts; ruling class solidarity is thicker than water and maybe thicker even than blood. But, for a savior wannabe, the fact that the real winners November 8 were Priebus and Ryan and others of their ilk has got to smart.

***

Even to this date, Trump seems remarkably uninterested in governance or in learning about the world. He has even stayed away from intelligence briefings.

Instead, he has remained, as best he can, in campaign mode – reveling in the crowds he still draws, and saying and doing whatever he feels like saying or doing at the time.

His telephone chat last Friday with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen was true to form too. Did he even know that he was putting four decades of China policy in jeopardy?

Or was he revising America’s one China policy without bothering to tell anybody or to explain what he was doing? Either way, so much for what an earlier President called “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind…”

Based on briefings from Trump apologists, sycophantic media, led by the more awful than ever Washington Post, are now claiming that the Donald’s affront to the Chinese was calculated and had been in the works for weeks. So much for a “decent respect” for the intelligence of their readers!

If they had any of that, they would be pointing out that, by going rogue on China, Trump proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he is about as much of a diplomat as the average third grader.

Before long, even the chumps who are now giving the Donald the benefit of the doubt will realize that turning the ship of state over to him is like giving the keys to the family car to a third grader – but with the difference that the damage a third grader could do is trivial in comparison to what the Commander-in-Chief of a bloated, armed to the teeth military, equipped with nuclear weapons out the wazoo, could unload upon the world.

How is faith in Trump possible? There is no entirely satisfactory answer; the phenomenon defies explanation. But the fact that, even now, with the Protestant Ethic a dead letter, many Americans still take success in business as an outward sign of inner grace is surely part of the story.

Trump has been successful in business, but not exactly for reasons of the kind that the Pilgrim Fathers would approve. He has never been one to postpone gratification; worldly asceticism is most assuredly not his thing.

From his father, Trump got a lot of money and a lot of political juice. He put both to use enriching himself further, flaunting his wealth every chance he got. And but for the lawyers and accountants who guided him in the fine arts of tax avoidance and in the use of bankruptcy laws to make others pay for his mistakes, he would be a poor man today.

Nevertheless, there actually are people, quite a few of them, who think that Trump is a great businessman and will therefore be a great President. Trying to talk them out of their beliefs is pointless. They are wedded to their benightedness.

The Donald is hardly suited to the office to which he has been elected, but there is no denying that he was an outstanding candidate. He put on a good show, and he knew how to work his marks. He is still hard at it.

The Carrier deal is a case in point. The much-ballyhooed narrative has it that Trump made a phone call and voilà, a thousand jobs were saved. Well, perhaps not a thousand, since some of them were upper-level management jobs that were never moving. But who’s counting?

Of course, no one outside Trump’s inner circle, maybe no one outside his head, knows what he did to pull of this public relations stunt. All that is known so far is that Carrier will be getting some seven million dollars worth of tax concessions from Indiana taxpayers for keeping some jobs in Indiana.

For how long, nobody knows. This would be the umpteenth time states and cities have bribed capitalists to stay put. The record is disappointing; they seldom stay put for long.

The Trump apologists’ line is that by lowering corporate tax rates, capitalists will be happy to do their part in making America great again by keeping manufacturing jobs here. What kinds of idiots do Trump apologists take the American people for!

What capitalists these days care about is the free flow of capital; this has almost nothing to do with corporate tax rates. If they can take their money anywhere, they will buy the cheapest labor they can find, consistent only with their need to maintain control over the production process and with the exigencies of marketing their goods and services wherever the markets for them are.

No doubt, Trump’s “deal” involved carrots and sticks about which he and his apologists are keeping mum – most likely, many carrots and very few sticks. Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies, is a major defense contractor – in plain speak, a death merchant. It lives or dies at the pleasure of the Pentagon and other government agencies. Trump had plenty of carrots and sticks to brandish.

But Trump is Trump; he doesn’t know when to stop. With one vengeful, fact-free tweet about the costs involved in building the next version of Air Force One, he sent Boeing stock plummeting, putting many jobs in jeopardy. There is no reason to think that he will stop there, or that he cares that “free market” economists are telling him, with increasing vehemence, that this is not how a healthy capitalism works.

He will care, though, if what we euphemistically call “the business community” comes to regard him as a menace. Then he will have a lot more to deal with than the chumps he has deceived.

The situation is complicated, however, because capitalists are nothing if not greedy, and Trump seems to be getting ready to buy many of them off.

To that end, expect him to make a big show soon of making good on one of his better campaign promises – rebuilding America’s transportation infrastructure.

However, Trump’s will not be the kind of infrastructure program that we desperately need, and that we had in the FDR through Eisenhower era, continuing, in diminished form, even as the Vietnam War depleted public funds.

It will not be financed out of public monies. Republicans have been standing in the way of anything like that for as long as anyone can remember, and now that they and Trump need each other badly, this is not about to change.

Trump wants to finance his fiscal stimulus by offering developers tax breaks. This will enrich them egregiously, while running up major deficits.

In principle, fiscal stimuli encourage inflation. Combine that with increasingly massive debt, then add on reckless deregulation, and you can be sure that financial crises will come even more frequently than in the past, and that they will be a lot more devastating in their consequences.

Ironically, Trump’s infrastructure program is very much like Obamacare, the Obama era government program that Republicans hate the most. They hate it mainly because this was Obama’s signature issue and they hate Obama – for all the wrong reasons.

No matter that its core ideas were hatched at the rightwing Heritage Foundation, and that something like it was put in place in Massachusetts before Obama was elected — by then Governor Mitt Romney.

Obamacare extended insurance coverage to many, though far from all, uninsured Americans, and it mandated insurance reforms that even its fiercest critics now no longer oppose. But the good it did came with a price.

As would have happened under Hillarycare a generation earlier, it reinforced the power of health care profiteers –the private insurance companies, the for-profit health care industry and, worst of all, Big Pharma. In the short run, everybody won – though not all the profiteers thought they had won enough. But it also postponed, probably for another generation, the day when, at last, the United States will rise to the level of other developed, and many not-so-developed, countries by according its citizens health care as a right.

Similarly, if Trump does follow through on his infrastructure promises, many workers will be helped, and many others will be helped indirectly because of the money that will be introduced into the economy.

But this will only ameliorate, temporarily and modestly, the increasingly dire condition of everyone who is not at the very top of the prevailing income and wealth distribution, while financiers and developers will prosper like never before.

***

If personnel is policy, as the saying goes, then either the Donald has some very bizarre policy views in mind, or, more likely, he has nothing in mind at all.

How pathetic is it that one if the few appointments Trump has made that is not preposterous on its face, his pick of Four Star General James “Mad Dog” Mattis to head the Defense Department, puts the principle of civilian control of the military in jeopardy! Pundits across the spectrum, from A to B, seem to like him; so do John McCain and Hillary’s Defense-Secretary-In-Waiting, Michèle Flournoy.

It seems that, unlike the Donald, he reads books and owns quite a few on military history. Yippee. No matter that his views are a tad incoherent – much like Obama’s and Clinton’s, and McCain’s and Flournoy’s. For instance, if reports in the media are on track, he wants to ratchet up the war against the Islamic State and other jihadi groups, while simultaneously ratcheting up opposition to Russia and Iran. Perhaps he hasn’t noticed that Russia has already largely done the Islamic State in. Or perhaps the principle that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” has been repealed and they haven’t bothered to tell anybody about it except the dunces at the Pentagon, the White House and Foggy Bottom.

But at least he is not another Curtis LeMay or a Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, and, given the standards in place in Trumpland, that is something to cheer. Also, since it seems that the Secretary of Defense could impede, and maybe even block, a President who, in a fit of pique, goes off the deep end with the nuclear codes, it is reassuring to have a professional military man on the job.

It is much the same with Trump’s pick of retired Marine General John Kelley to head the Department of Homeland Security — except that in his passion to “secure” the border, he does conform more to the Jack D. Ripper template. Trump seems to have a thing for Generals, even more than for real estate tycoons and Wall Street predators. Military school must have made more of an impression on the young Donald’s mind than Wharton.

In any case, with those possible exceptions, all of Trump’s choices are laughable; or would be if the condition of the ninety-nine percent was less troubled, and if the United States wasn’t doing a lot more than its fair share to bring on a global ecological catastrophe, and if it didn’t have a huge military presence in all the four corners of the world and a nuclear arsenal capable many times over of ending life on earth “as we know it,” as they say in Clintonese.

There are, of course, the unspeakably vile ones: Steve Bannon for Senior Counselor to the President heading the list. Among other things, Bannon will be Trump’s liaison with the white supremacist community and with the Islamophobes and fascisant miscreants in the Trump base.

Bringing up the rear, there is his National Security Advisor, Lt. General Michael Flynn, one of the most blatantly Islamophobic nimrods in the military today.

Flynn was forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014 after clashing with his superiors over his “management style”; among other things, he is said to have been abusive to his staff, and inclined to make “facts” up.

As everybody now knows, Flynn’s son and “chief of staff,” Michael Junior, retweeted fake news stories about how Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, Robby Mook, ran a child sex ring out of popular family pizza restaurant in northwest Washington DC. Father and son were both on the Trump transition team, and Flynn Senior retweeted his share too, though without specifically naming the restaurant.

The two of them were part of a social media blitz that led a bona fide North Carolina “deplorable” to drive to Washington to “investigate” the situation, and to brandish and fire an assault rifle in the pizza parlor.

Coordinating intelligence reports and evaluating their veracity will be high on the list of Flynn Senior’s tasks as National Security Advisor.

Congressman Mike Pompeo, Trump’s choice to head the CIA, is not only among the most vicious Islamophobes in Congress – no mean feat – but is also a fervent opponent of abortion and everything else opposed by the Christian Right.

Billionaire Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education, isn’t much better in that regard. She is an ardent privatizer too, and an enemy of public education.

But DeVos actually looks good, on the social reactionary scale, compared to Georgia Congressman Tom Price, M.D., Trump’s choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services. If it were up to that crank, even Medicare would be in trouble.

And then there is Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, Trump’s choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt’s passion is suing the EPA. In Oklahoma, he led the state’s fight against EPA efforts to rein in carbon pollution and to protect drinking water. The energy industry owns his heart and mind.

The competition is stiff, but this may be the worst Trump appointment of all.

Like Pruitt, Trump’s choice of Alabama Senator Jeff Session for Attorney General, is both ludicrous and vile.

In saner times, efforts to make Sessions a federal judge were rejected by the Senate mainly for blatantly racist remarks he had made. There are countless other reasons too why the very idea of Sessions in that post would set all Heaven in a rage, if only Heaven existed. In that vein, it bears mention that he too is an ardent opponent of anything and everything frowned upon by the Christian Right, abortion and same sex marriage above all.

Then there are the choices that are just simply ludicrous: among others, Nikki Haley for Ambassador to the United Nations, and, most bizarre of all, the hapless Ben Carson for the job of Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Haley, the Governor of South Carolina, a benighted state even by Southern standards, prepared for the role of top diplomat by earning a bachelor’s degree in accounting. Her parents came to the United States from India, however, so she is probably more aware of the outside world than the average white South Carolinian.

Moreover, compared to Carson, she is an ace. The good doctor has all but admitted that he knows nothing about housing, and has no experience dealing with, much less managing, large and complex bureaucracies. A celebrated brain surgeon years ago, he has morphed into a dull-witted laughing stock who believes, among other things, that poverty is a choice.

This did not prevent him from briefly leading the field of Republican candidates seeking the nomination for President in 2016, but it has significantly diminished the level of prestige accorded brain surgeons. When the point is to say that something is not difficult or doesn’t require exceptional intelligence to figure out, we say, for reasons that are not entirely clear, “it’s not rocket science” or, nearly as often, we compare it to brain surgery. Thanks to Carson, rocket science now has the honor all to itself.

Of late too, Carson, who fancies himself a personal friend of Jesus, has been letting loose with anti-Muslim drivel that would embarrass even Pruitt and Flynn. Among other things, he has claimed that Islam is not a real religion. Obviously, he will be a stellar addition to the menagerie the Donald is assembling.

Any and all of these appointments could make trouble for Trump, but none so much as the ones that fall transparently into the bait and switch category. When Trump voters realize what chumps they were, the Donald will rue the day he let his autocratic fantasies supersede what little common sense he had.

Trump chose Steven Mnuchin, a notorious bankster with impeccable Goldman Sachs connections for the key role of Secretary of the Treasury. Like many Wall Streeters, Mnuchin has, over the years, “donated” huge sums to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton. This has already been noticed in rightwing news sources.

But his appointment will reassure one-percenters that, campaign promises notwithstanding, they have nothing to fear from their class brother. On the other hand, the people that media pundits call “populists” will likely have a different take on the situation, once they stop being bedazzled by Trump’s badass bluster.

Vulture capitalist Wilbur Ross, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Commerce is, if anything, even less “populist” hero material than Mnuchin. When Woody Guthrie talked about bankers robbing people not with six-shooters but with fountain pens, it was people like Ross – and Mnuchin too – that he had in mind.

And, as if all that were not enough, Trump has announced that he will be convening a panel of high-flyers to consult with him on a monthly basis. According to CNN, the group has been assembled by Steven Schwartzman, CEO of the notorious Blackstone Group, and is made up of a “who’s who” of CEOs – including GM’s Mary Barra, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, GE’s former CEO Jack Welch, Bob Iger from Disney and Walmart’s Doug McMillon. This should set Trump voters’ hearts aflutter.

It’s the old story in what we have come to call “democracies”: vote for X and get not-X. At least this time the disillusionment will come to those who need and deserve it most.

UPDATE:

As of this writing, news is breaking that Trump has named fast food (Hardee’s and Carl Jr.’s ) CEO, Andrew Puzder, to be his Secretary of Labor. This is bad news for workers fighting for a $15/hour minimum wage and for unions. It also ought to further explode the myth that Trump is on the workers’ side. It probably won’t, though – at least not at first. There are still to many scales on the eyes of too many working people.

Meanwhile, the Donald has yet to tweet his choice for Secretary of State. I would be very surprised were he to come up with somebody who, like Mad Dog Mattis, is not stupendously awful. It will more likely be somebody like Mike Flynn — vile and ludicrous but not totally inappropriate, the way that Ben Carson is.

John Bolton has been to Trump Tower several times, presumably to talk himself up. He is certainly odious enough to win the Donald over. But he is an unreconstructed neocon, and Trump claims to be non-ideological. He probably isn’t, but then he isn’t consistent either.

Here’s a thought: in much the way that Dick Cheney chose himself to be George Bush’s Vice President, Jared Kushner, the Trump son-in-law and key transition advisor, could pick himself. He’d be perfect for the job: totally unprepared, loyal to the Great Man, and, just in case rightwing Zionists get antsy over Steve Bannon’s flirtations with classical anti-Semites, he would be there to reassure them that when Trump goes after everybody else, he will leave the Jews alone – except, of course, the ones who are secular or liberal or insufficiently enamored of a certain ethnocratic settler state.

What I hope most, though, is that Trump goes for Mitt Romney. Then the bait and switch will be so glaringly obvious that even the most obtuse Trump supporters would have to realize how snookered they have been.

Their fury, once unleashed, will do Trump in faster and more decisively than anything else could.

]]>Chris Welzenbachhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889962016-12-09T17:54:26Z2016-12-09T09:01:31ZMore]]>Last week, on the 75th anniversary of the December 7, 1941 sneak attack on our naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i, I witnessed endless remembrances and memorial ceremonies. On the History Channel FDR’s “a date that shall live in infamy” speech was played and replayed relentlessly. Documentary footage and interviews with those few living survivors were ubiquitous, and the local paper came weighted with a special insert—including a thick wad of advertising—memorializing the event.

But as the 50th anniversary of June 8, 1967 approaches, another sneak attack on the US military by enemy aircraft and naval vessels goes largely unremembered. On that day the USS Liberty was attacked without warning, leaving thirty-four men dead and another one hundred seventy-one injured. Those responsible for this heinous crime have never been held accountable. Survivors of the USS Liberty have waged a 50-year war for recognition of their courage and endurance under fire that has been deliberately ignored by US media, US lawmakers and the US military.

A spy ship operated by the NSA, the Liberty‘s sole purpose on June 8, 1967 was to gather signal intelligence on a conflict later called the Six Day War. She was operating just 15 miles off Sinai, in international waters, but should never have been so close inshore. Her controllers back in the US had determined such a location to be unduly hazardous and that she should steam 100 miles farther out to sea, but their communications with the state-of-the-art surveillance vessel—for foolish bureaucratic reasons—failed to get through.

Days earlier, on May 31, 1967, Marine Sergeant Bryce Lockwood was rousted from sleep and informed that orders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff had directed him to Rota, Spain, where he was to join the crew of the Liberty. Lockwood was an intelligence specialist and a Russian interpreter. These new orders were a surprise. He had no seabag so he packed a suitcase, and the following morning he reported aboard ship.

Lockwood had some notion why he’d been enlisted for this specific task: the United Arab Republic—fronted by Egypt—was backed by the Soviet Union. Three Russian Tu-95 spy planes were operating out of Alexandria. Ostensibly operating under the aupices of the Egyptian military, these aircraft were solely under Soviet control and flown by Russian pilots. Lockwood’s job was to catch them—through intercepted communications—speaking Russian in flight. Lockwood’s contention that Liberty‘s primary purpose was to determine Soviet intentions during the conflict is borne out by instructions given the eavesdroppers: any intercepts in Hebrew were to be ignored.

When I asked Lockwood about life aboard Liberty he told me it was great: because of all the electronic equipment the ship was air conditioned and comfortable. That same electronic equipment hugely extended above deck, where a forest of antennae combed the sky for signal intelligence. There was even a big disk antenna on the aft deck that could bounce signals off the moon clear back to home base in Cheltenham, Maryland. A former World War II cargo ship, the Liberty had a top speed of 18 knots and by all accounts handled rough sea conditions well.

On the morning of June 8, 1967 the USS Liberty was patrolling off Sinai. Earlier Captain McGonagle had ordered the ship’s 50 caliber machine gun mounts to manned and ready at all times and repeatedly reminded his crew that they were in a war zone. According to CMT (Cryptological Technician (Maintenance)) Ernie Gallo: “We’d darken the ship at night and two gunners were kept in the forward gun mounts 24/7 in flak jackets and helmets”.

That morning the weather was clear and sunny with a light breeze and a gentle swell. The Arab town of El Arish was plainly visible from deck. Lieutenant James Ennes had the con. Lt. Ennes used the prayer tower of the El Arish mosque as a reference point by which to navigate. Early in the day an Israeli bomber was seen flying over Sinai, on a course parallel to the ship. Later a bulky twin-engined cargo plane (a French-built Noratlas) plainly marked with the Israeli Star of David flew over Liberty, evidently to ascertain the vessel’s identity.

When Lt. Ennes first took command of the bridge that morning he saw that Liberty‘s flag had fouled on some lines and was streaked and dirty. He ordered it replaced. The only flag left in the locker was a “holiday” flag—an extra large banner reserved for special occasions. This unusually large flag was visible at a great distance and those aboard Liberty felt reassured that the Israelis piloting the plane would not mistake her identity. Lt. Commander David Lewis reported to me that: “When we saw that they were looking after us we all relaxed.”

Midmorning a blast was heard from direction of El Arish and a large cloud of smoke frothed above the little town. Captain McGonagle ordered a gas drill, fearing the smoke onshore might be poison gas. According to James Bamford in Book of Secrets (First Anchor Books Edition, 2002), sinister events were unfolding in the Arab settlement:

As the Liberty sat within eyeshot of El Arish, eavesdropping on surrounding communications, Israeli soldiers turned the town into a slaughterhouse, systematically butchering their prisoners. In the shadow of the El Arish mosque, they lined up about sixty unarmed Egyptian prisoners, hands tied behind their backs, and then opened fire with machine guns until the pale desert sand turned red. Then they forced other prisoners to bury the victims in mass graves. (Book of Secrets at pp. 201-202)

It would later emerge that Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, not satisfied with seizing Sinai and the West Bank, now sought to capture the Golan Heights. He needed additional men for the assault and could only find them on Sinai, but the men stationed there were burdened with Egyptian POWs—hence the dreadful instruction to commit mass murder.

The clumsy-looking Israeli Noratlas reappeared at about eleven and orbited Liberty several times. Crewmen were sunbathing on deck. They waved to the aircraft’s crewmen, who waved back. At noon Captain McGonagle drilled the men at General Quarters and at 12:20 pm they stepped down.

Following the drill Sgt. Lockwood visited the small stores shop and bought some tee-shirts before retiring to his bunk, where he stamped his name on his newly purchased underwear. On deck Lt. Ennes was told the ship’s radar had identified three aircraft approachng Liberty at high speed. They came out of the sun.

The attack was totally unexpected. Rocket and cannon fire from the lead aircraft killed most of the crewmen on deck and left Lt. Ennes badly injured. The second aircraft very nearly destroyed every last antenna on the intelligence gathering ship. Belowdecks, Sgt. Lockwood said it was like being inside a steel drum that someone was beating with a sledge hammer. The whole ship rang with the sound of metal striking metal. Before the alarm went off Sgt. Lockwood was already en route to his battle station.

Liberty‘s crew did not initially recognize the national origin of the attacking warplanes. In Book of Secrets Bamford reports that markings on the wings and fuselages of the warplanes had been crudely painted over. When I questioned Lt. Lloyd Painter—who was on deck with Lt. Ennes during the attack—he confirmed this to be true. In the event, the aircraft were Israeli Mirage III fighter-bombers armed with rockets and 30 mm cannon that fired armor-piercing shells.

A rocket strike destroyed the two forward 50 caliber mounts and killed the gunners. Further strikes destroyed the ship’s whaleboat and ruptured gasoline tanks located on deck that spilled a river of flame over the ship’s side and into the sea. In his account of the attack, Assault on the Liberty (Ballantine Books, 1979, Ivy Books, 1987) Lt. Ennes describes a chaotic scene topside: “Blood flowed, puddled and coagulated everywhere. Men stepped in blood, slipped and fell in it, tracked it about in great crimson footprints” (p 71).

Sgt. Lockwood’s battle station was the processing and reporting office, well below decks, where the ship’s electronic eavesdroppers sifted data for the President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the NSA. Here he received an order he’d expected but had been seriously dreading: all intelligence material was to be gathered up and placed in ditch bags—large weighted canvas bags that would then be tossed overboard, destroying thousands of manhours of difficult intelligence work. Hundreds of pounds of data including reels of magnetic tape had to be ditched.

Topside Lt. Ennes watched as slower, smaller Mystere jets joined the Mirage III’s that had first attacked. The Mysteres carried napalm. In Assault on the Liberty he reports: “In a technique probably designed for desert warfare but fiendish against a ship at sea, the Mystere pilots launched rockets from a distance, then dropped huge silvery metallic napalm canisters as they passed overhead. The jellied slop burst into furious flame on impact, coating everything, then surged through the fresh rocket holes to burn frantically among the men inside.” (p. 78)

Badly injured and stretched out on the deck of the pilothouse, Ennes observed Captain McGonagle silhouetted against a wall of flame as the ship’s commander ordered out Liberty‘s fire suppression team. Meantime, Liberty’s radiomen frantically tried to raise the Sixth Fleet but discovered that the attacking Israelis were jamming their radio communications, including their distress frequencies—which is a violation of international law. But the jamming ceased whenever the attacking jets prepared to fire rockets—evidently it messed up their guidance systems. It was then discovered that among the wilderness of antennae festooning Liberty‘s upper deck one slender still-functioning antenna remained—but its connection had been severed. A radioman named Terry Halbardier set out with a spool of coaxial cable intent on reconnecting it. He succeeded, but returned to the radio room bloodied from shrapnel. Four decades later Halbardier was belatedly awarded the Silver Star. His citation reads as follows:

The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the Silver Star to Electronics Technician Third Class James Terry Halbardier, United States Navy, for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action while serving on board the U.S.S. LIBERTY (AGTR-5), on 8 June 1967. The U.S.S. LIBERTY was attacked by Israeli aircraft and motor torpedo boats in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea on the fourth day of the SIX DAY WAR. Petty Officer Halbardier, without hesitation and with complete disregard for his own personal safety, fearlessly and repeatedly exposed himself to overwhelming rocket and machinegun fire to repair a damaged antenna in an open deck area during heavy aerial attacks. Aware that all of the ship’s transmitting antennas had been destroyed and that communication with higher authority depended upon antenna repair, Petty Officer Halbardier risked his life to run connecting coaxial cable across open decks from the antenna to the main transmitter room. His efforts allowed the ship to establish communications with distant elements of the SIXTH Fleet and call for assistance. Despite being wounded, Petty Officer Halbardier ignored his injuries until the antenna had been repaired and the call for help had been received and acknowledged. His courageous actions were critical in alerting distant Navy commanders to the ship’s need for assistance and were instrumental in saving the ship and hundreds of lives. Petty Officer Halbardier’s outstanding display of decisive leadership, unrelenting perseverance, and loyal devotion to duty reflected great credit upon him and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.

The USS Saratoga, an aircraft carrier, received Liberty‘s frantic pleas and transmitted an acknowledgment. Word spread through the ship that help was on its way. By this time napalm had scorched and blackened the entire front of the vessel as the Israeli warplanes pressed their attack—then unexpectedly bore away from the stricken surveillance ship. Three Israeli torpedo boats now approached Liberty in attack formation.

In Al Jazeera’s 2014 special When Israel Attacked America, recorded messages from the base controller directing the warplanes that attacked Liberty were played. In them we hear the controller tell the jets to lay off, saying: “Let’s leave something for the Navy to do.”

Belowdecks Sgt. Lockwood finished the miserable task of filling ditch bags and sat down at a plotting table to finish a cup of coffee when over the PA system the bridge announced: “Brace yourselves! Torpedo attack, starboard side!”

Ronnie Campbell, a good friend of Lockwood’s, fed a sheet of paper into a typewriter and began writing a letter to his wife: “Dear Eileen, you won’t believe what’s happening to us.” (In Assault on the Liberty, Ennes offers a slightly different version wherein Campbell types Dear Elizabeth, You won’t believe where we are. (p. 99))

Sgt. Lockwood stepped into a passageway for a word with Lt. Commander David Lewis, who was in overall command of the intelligence people aboard ship and who now sought to organize a work party to get the ditching bags overboard, when in Lockwood’s words: “There was a blinding flash of light and a terribly loud noise.” Lockwood took the blast face on, and his glasses spared his eyesight. Lt. Commander Lewis wasn’t so lucky. Positioned perpendicular to the strike, white hot paint fragments flew through the gap between Lewis’s glasses and his eyes, leaving him blind. It also blew both his ear drums. (His eyesight would later be restored in the hospital aboard the aircraft carrier USS America and he has also regained some of his hearing.)

The torpedo strike killed twenty-five men outright and punched a forty-foot hole in Liberty‘s starboard side. (Of five torpedos fired at Liberty, only one actually hit.) Sgt. Lockwood was knocked to the deck. He feared his life was over. Then he felt something cold—sea water was gushing in through a split in a nearby bulkhead. He struggled to his feet and heard someone behind him moan. A sailor named Joe Lentini had been badly injured by a rocket blast and now lay pinned behind a section of the bulkhead split by the torpedo strike. There was no light in the passageway save that filtering in through the gaping torpedo hole. Adding to the misery of those trapped belowdecks, fuel bunkers had ruptured and heavy stinking fuel oil swam through the lower passageways.

Water continued to pour in, threatening to drown the trapped sailor. Lockwood managed to free Lentini and moments later the entire passageway was flooded, leaving about eighteen inches of airspace below a deckhead crowded with pipes and conduits. Liberty had lost her engines, had lost her “way” and thus her stability, and now slipped into the trough of the waves where she rolled at the mercy of the swell. Lockwood spied an unconscious sailor drifting toward the torpedo hole. He asked was Lentini okay and when he received a response in the affirmative, went after the unconscious sailor—who was about to be pulled out to sea.

Topside, burning napalm cooked off ammunition at the 50 caliber mounts. Ennes writes: “Captain McGonagle was almost alone on the bridge when the torpedo struck. His navigator was dead, the executive officer dying; the officer of the deck and the junior officer of the deck were both badly wounded and out of the action; the helmsman was wounded; the quartermaster dead; lookouts, messengers, signalmen, all were dead or wounded, all below, all away from the holocaust on the bridge.” (Assault on the Liberty at p. 104)

The three torpedo boats now circled Liberty, firing armor-piercing bullets at her waterline. She listed heavily to starboard but in the estimation of Ensign John Scott, the vessel’s Damage Control Officer, the surveillance vessel was in no immediate danger of sinking—but she couldn’t handle another torpedo strike.

Belowdecks Lockwood struggled with the unconscious sailor. The passageway was dark and filled with smoke and the ship kept rolling. Lockwood tried to get the sailor to a ladderway leading topside but slipped and dropped him and again the ship rolled and again the sailor was in danger of being swept out to sea. Lockwood, a deeply religious man who would later become an ordained minister, used a bad word. He said: “Dammit.”

Lockwood retrieved the unconscious sailor and started back up the ladderway where the force of the torpedo blast had bent the railing, leaving a space some 16 inches wide to negotiate. Again Lockwood dropped the sailor and again Lockwood retrieved him. This time he made it past the bent railing and reached the hatch, only to find it sealed shut. Lockwood lost his temper. He struggled to keep the unconscious sailor’s head above water and started pounding on the hatch. After a time a sailor heard his frantic blows and pulled the hatch open and both Lockwood and the man he carried emerged on deck. Lockwood then turned to go back down. The Sergeant has little memory of what happened next, but evidently he found yet another unconscious sailor and once again hauled the injured man up to the relative safety of the deck. Then the hatch was closed and sealed.

Sgt. Lockwood genuinely believed Liberty was being attacked by Egyptians and figured once the ship was taken he’d likely spend years in an Egyptian POW camp, so he made his way to his locker and pulled out his extra pair of glasses and a copy of the New Testament. Back on deck he was instructed to go to the radio room, which was on the port side of the ship and thus sheltered from the withering machine gun fire of the torpedo boats, which now lay off Liberty‘s starboard side.

Sailors, aware of Liberty‘s communication with the Sixth Fleet, loudly wondered when help would arrive. Meantime, the order “Prepare to Abandon Ship” went out. Lockwood recalls seeing sailors haul three life rafts through the radio room and a short time later heard diesel engines revving, followed by a burst of machine gun fire. One of the sailors returned to the radio room and reported to the injured men housed there that the torpedo boats had strafed the life rafts as they floated next to the ship. Interviewed for the Al Jazeera special When Israel Attacked America, Lt. Lloyd Painter stated: “I saw a motor torpedo boat—plainly Israeli—machine gunning our life rafts.” In Assault on the Liberty Ennes writes:

Lurking lazily a few hundred yards away, patiently waiting for Liberty to sink, the men on the torpedo boats watched the orange rafts drop into the water. [Petty Officer Thomas] Smith saw someone move on the center boat as her engine growled and her stern settled lower in the water. The boat moved closer to Liberty. When within good machine-gun range she opened fire on the empty life rafts, deflating two and cutting the line to the third, which floated away like a child’s balloon on the surface of the water.

Smith cursed helplessly as the torpedo boat stopped to take the raft aboard. Then the boats added speed, taking the raft with them, and turned toward their base at Ashdod, sixty-five miles away. (p. 115)

Then came two Israeli assault helicopters packed with Israeli soldiers brandishing machine guns and hand grenades. These aircraft were clearly marked with the Star of David. Captain McGonagle gave the order to repel boarders. According to Sgt. Lockwood, the soldiers on the two helicopters had one sole purpose—to go through the ship from stem to stern and kill every man still living. But the helicopters made no attempt to land or to offload their deadly cargo and after a while they simply flew off.

Some time later a lone helicopter approached the stricken surveillance ship. This one carried Commander Ernest Castle, the US Naval Attache at Tel Aviv. He dropped a brown paper bag to the deck containing his card, on the back of which was written: Have you any casualties? The bag landed next to the severed leg of a fallen sailor. When Castle’s card was brought to the bridge, Captain McGonagle studied it a moment and raised his middle finger at the Naval Attache hovering overhead, who would subsequently report to the US Embassy that Liberty had suffered a single casualty.

The attack—that had lasted nearly two hours—finally ended and those still alive were out of danger, but help from the Sixth Fleet would not arrive for another sixteen hours. Thirty-four men died that day aboard Liberty and another one hundred seventy-one were injured. The life raft taken by the Israeli torpedo boat and the wheel of the torpedo boat that succeeded in hitting Liberty are on display at Israel’s National Maritime Museum in Haifa. In Israel, those who participated in the attack are celebrated as national heroes.

“The populace may hiss me, but when I go home and think of my money, I applaud myself.”

—Horace, Epistles

It’s been a month since the election, and in the mirrored halls of the news and social media the contributors of uplifting opinion have been telling themselves that no matter what else might be said about the campaigns and the vote, it was a great day for Democracy. Rough and tumble democracy in the raw, free-range, artisanal and organic, the will of the people trampling out the vintage of political correctness, emerging from the ash heap of vicious cant, texting “yes” to the Declaration of Independence, “no” to an uncivil transfer of power. Cue the music, roll the camera and the flag. The people have spoken. Our democracy lives. Government of the people, by the people and for the people is not perished from the earth.

Which might have been the case had Bernie Sanders been on the ballot. He wasn’t, and neither was democracy. What was on the ballot was plutocracy, complacently stupefied and transparently corrupt at the top of the Republican and the Democratic ticket. Two gold-plated names on the same boardroom door, both candidates representative of and privileged by a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich that for the last thirty years has been arranging the country’s political and socioeconomic affairs. The election campaign was the struggle for control of corporate management, Hillary Clinton seeking to fend off a hostile takeover by Donald Trump, the lady and the lout both standing four square and true blue for the freedom of money, steadfast and vigilant against the freedoms of movement and thought.

Clinton lost the election because she tried to pretend what she was not—a caring friend of all the people, ardent believer in the rule of law. She could talk the prerecorded talk, but she couldn’t walk the walk, her prior record, like her every move and gesture, showing her to be in it for herself, deserving of the deference owed to the Queen of England, the jack of diamonds and the ace of spades.

Trump won the election because he didn’t try to sell the Gettysburg Address. Upfront and fascist in his scorn for the democratic idea, he declared his candidacy on June 16, 2015, a deus ex machina descending by escalator into the atrium of Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, there to say, and say it plainly, democracy is for losers. Money, ladies and gentlemen, is power, and power, my friends, is not self-sacrificing or Democratic. Never was and never will be; law unto itself, and the only one that counts. Name of the game, nature of the beast.

The mogul could afford the luxury of truth because he was really, really rich, un-bought and un-bossed, so selfishly and fearlessly rich he was free to do and say whatever it came into his head to do and say, whatever it took to root out the cowardly incompetence in Washington, clean up the mess in the Middle East, plant well-paying jobs in the American heartland. His was the greatest brand on earth come to make America once again the greatest show on earth, revive it with the sweet smell of his signature men’s colognes, Empire and Success.

Trump didn’t need briefing papers or policy positions to refine the message. He embodied it live and in person, an unscripted and overweight canary flown from its gilded cage, telling it like it is from the inside looking out. Had he time or patience for messing around with books, he could have sourced his wisdom to Supreme Court Justice Lewis Brandeis, who in 1933 presented the case to Franklin D. Roosevelt at the outset of the New Deal:

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

In the world according to Trump, as it was in the worlds according to Alexander Hamilton and Ronald Reagan, democracy is a tip on a dead horse. An idea as far past its sell-by date as FDR’s straw hat, not up to the task of keeping America safe or running the trains on time. Too long-winded and slow, soft in the head and weak in the knees, no match for the barbarians (Mexican and African, radical Islamic and leftist academic) at the gates of Westchester County and Palm Beach.

Not the exact words in Trump’s self-glorifying mouth, but the gist of the commandment he brought down from his Mount Sinai penthouse suite in June 2015, the one that for the next eighteen months he tweeted to phone and shouted to camera in red states and blue, pandering to the popular resentment and loathing of the Washington politicians and Wall Street masters of the universe who for two generations have been playing ordinary Americans for suckers.

Trump never tired of trash-talking the system of which he was a proud and ornamental figurehead, and the fans on fairgrounds in Kentucky and Ohio screamed and stamped in agreement because what he was saying they knew to be true—not as precept from a high-minded think tank but from their own downwardly mobile experience. Up close and personal they had suffered the consequences of the plutocracy’s ongoing and bi-partisan slum clearance project—class warfare waged by the increasingly frightened rich against the increasingly debt-burdened, disenfranchised and angry poor, the bulk of the nation’s wealth (actual and virtual, animal, mineral, vegetable and intellectual) amassed by 10% of its population, more laws restraining the freedom of persons, fewer laws limiting the license of property, the systematic juggling of the public light and land and air into the private purse, a national security apparatus herding sheep into the shelters of heavy law enforcement and harmless speech, every occupant of the White House from Reagan to Obama pleased to hold himself above the law, both houses of Congress reduced to impotent paralysis, a political discourse made by a news media presenting presidential candidates as game show contestants mounted on selfie sticks and played for jokes until brought to judgment on election night before the throne of cameras by whom and for whom they are produced.

The camera doesn’t do democracy; democracy is the holding of one’s fellow citizens in respectful regard, not because they are beautiful or rich or famous but because they are one’s fellow citizens and therefore worth the knowing what they say and do. The work is tedious and slow; too many words with too little action doesn’t sell tickets. What sells tickets is celebrity, and because the camera sees but doesn’t think, it makes no meaningful or moral distinction between a bubble bath in Las Vegas staffed by pretty girls and a bloodbath in Palmyra staffed by headless corpses. The return on investment in both scene settings is the bankable flow of emotion drawn from the bottomless wells of human wish, dream, ignorance and fear.

It didn’t matter what Trump said or didn’t say, whether he was cute and pink or headless. The journalists on the road with the mogul’s traveling circus weren’t covering a play of ideas; like flies to death and honey, they were drawn to the sweet decaying smell of overripe celebrity, enchanted, as is their custom, by the romance of crime.

Blind to homespun shoes on common ground, the camera gazes adoringly at leather boots on horseback. So does the America movie-going public. Always a sight for sore eyes, the boots on horseback. They ride into town with the lonesome pine hero in the trail-weary saddle, knight errant, deadly and just, up against the odds and the system, come to remove the corrupt sheriff and redeem the God-fearing settlers, clean up the mess in the Middle West saloon, set the crooked straight, distribute moral fabric, civic virtue and a fair share of the loot to the storekeep, the shepherd and the school teacher.

Trump pitched his campaign on the storyline the movie-going electorate likes a lot better than the one about Honest Abe Lincoln. The networks, the cable channels and the self-adoring social media, hoisted him up there in lights with robber-barons Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, gunslingers Eastwood and Stallone, mafia dons Corleone and Soprano. November 8, 2016 may become a night to remember, but it wasn’t a great day for democracy.

This essay originally appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly. It’s reprinted here with permission of the author.

Last week CounterPunch and others demanded the Washington Post retract and apologize for their shoddy article by Craig Timberg that smeared some 200 websites as Russian propagandists. Our friends at Truthdig and Naked Capitalism, both named as Putinistas, fired off demand letters. A petition was also sent to Post editor Martin Baron. Needless to say, they felt the heat.

On Wednesday the Post added a note atop their article, essentially trying to put a little breathing room behind their “journalism” and their main source, an obscure anonymous outfit called PropOrNot.

“The Washington Post on Nov. 24 published a story on the work of four sets of researchers who have examined what they say are Russian propaganda efforts to undermine American democracy and interests. One of them was PropOrNot, a group that insists on public anonymity, which issued a report identifying more than 200 websites that, in its view, wittingly or unwittingly published or echoed Russian propaganda. A number of those sites have objected to being included on PropOrNot’s list, and some of the sites, as well as others not on the list, have publicly challenged the group’s methodology and conclusions. The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor did the article purport to do so. Since publication of The Post’s story, PropOrNot has removed some sites from its list.”

Apparently the Post editors were unaware of the drivel Timberg wrote in his hearty embrace of PropOrNot’s “findings”.

“PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.”

So on the one hand the Post realized PropOrNot is full of shit, but on the other they are still not willing to retract a bogus piece that used a suspect group as a primary source. So much for journalistic integrity. I shouldn’t be surprised, the Post had none to begin with.

In other news, it came to our attention this week that a “design technologist ” by the name of Daniel Sieradski has developed a plugin for Google’s Chrome web browser that alerts readers when they stumble upon CounterPunch.

Here’s what you’ll see with this so-called “BS Detector”.

Funny, no such red flag warning sprawls across the pages at the Post with this bullshit plugin. Anyway, I asked Sieradski to remove CounterPunch from his list of websites that are flagged by his little Mccarthyite application. Here was his initial response:

The “source” Sieradski references above was a futile attempt to tarnish CounterPunch as a bastion of right-wing, anti-semitic hate that came to our attention a couple of years ago. The author of the silly piece, Elise Hendrick, claimed to have conducted a statistical analysis of our articles, and came away with the certaintly that we “are helping to promote the agenda of the far right.” Of course, this came as news to us here at CP. We’ve published over 55,000 articles from some 6,000 different authors. Apparently, of these thousands of pieces, we “frequently” publish right-wing hatemongers. Here’s Jeffrey St. Clair’s response to this outlandish accusation:

“You are, naturally, quite free to draw what ever conclusions you like about the political slant of CounterPunch, but your assertions should at least have some tenuous tether to reality, especially when you purport to do a deep ‘statistical’ analysis of stories and authors. We’ve published more than 55,000 articles since 1999. Ralph Nader, alone, has written more than 400 articles for us. Is Ralph left or right? Well, he’s of Lebanese descent, so we can surmise where you would slot Ralph. That’s another 400 articles for your right wingers, I guess. How about Edward Said. Dozens of articles for the pre-eminent intellectual critic of Imperialism. But, yes, Edward was Palestinian and thus by your crafty declinations he was a birth-right right-winger. Kaching! More bonus points for you!! What about Fidel Castro, left or right? We run all of Fidel’s columns, all of Ricardo Alarcon’s, too. Critics of Israel. Shame on them. What about Philip Agee, former CIA spook who spilled the beans? We ran lots of stories by Phil before he died. How about Subcomandante Marcos. We’ve published almost all of his dispatches from the Lacondon. Left or right? Hard call. He is a smoker. Right hand column, I guess. Uri Avnery, Jew, former member of the Knesset, served with Begin in the Irgun. 500 articles by Uri. Hmm. Hard call. Put him in the excluded middle I guess.

What about Kathy Kelly? Catholic Worker, nominated several times for Nobel Prize. We published more than 300 pieces by Kathy and a book. More bait to lure naive leftists into a “trap.” Could be. What about one of the greatest living black novelists, Ishmael Reed? Is he a dupe? How about his daughter, Tennessee. We published her book on how the US education system throws one roadblock after another in front of young black women. That’s an entire book. How about Kevin Alexander Gray, one of the leading black civil rights organizers in the US, led the campaign to vanquish the Confederate Flag in South Carolina for two decades. Dozens of articles by Kevin and two books. But, whoops, he’s a critic of Israel. Does that make him a black white supremacist? I guess they do exist, consider the spectacle of Clarence Thomas. But I don’t think even you could squeeze Kevin into that box–not in his presence anyway. What about our book, Killing Trayvons? Just another con job? Frankly, I don’t care how you align our writers on your bifurcated little list, which has ominous overtones of other little lists kept by your compatriots in the not-so-distant past, but you should at least acknowledge their existence! And stop calling what you’re doing “statistical analysis”. As that infamous right-winger Mark Twain said, there’s lies, damned lies and statistics. But you don’t even HAVE statistics. Just your own hand-picked glob of silly putty. Good luck with your auto-de-fe.”

Sadly, I hold a MA is statistics (Lord knows why) and I can assure readers that Hendrick’s “analysis” isn’t sound enough to hold a bucket of shit, and that’s putting it very mildly. Of course, I pointed this out to our new friend Sieradski, who continued to argue that since we’ve run the likes of Gilad Atzmon and Alison Weir in the past, then by-god, we are an anti-semitic rag.

Readers of CounterPunch are well aware that we don’t take the issue of anti-semitism lightly. The charge is a serious one, but it’s lost its punch over the years as it is so often hurled at critics of Israel that it has little potency, which in turn only emboldens actual anti-semites. (For the record, I’ve been labeled a self-hating Jew and even a Zionist! So I know the terrain.)

When I pointed this out to Sieradski, noting that, of the 55,000+ articles we’ve published, we’ve never once ran anything close to anti-semitic. Anti-Zionist? Yes. Anti-Jew? Absolutely not. But like the Post, Sieradski doesn’t care about facts, that much is clear. To top it off, Sieraski charges that we house a bunch of bigots in our writing stable.

@joshua__frank if you have a bunch of bigots in your writing stable, you are legitimizing their bigotry, ergo you become a source of it

There’s little doubt that what Sieradski is attempting to do is to steer readers away from CounterPunch, based not on the actual content of CounterPunch, but on his ill-informed belief that our writers are Jew-hating bigots. As such, his plugin is an attempt to hurt, not only CounterPunch’s reputation, but our bottom line as well.

@selfagency We take anti-Semitism very seriously. But to tarnish CP based on opinions we haven't published in a dangerous game.

Did you fall for the narrative that “hey one good silver lining to the 2016 elections is that the total ass-kicking the dismal neoliberal Democrats got will show them that they have no choice but to make themselves over as a progressive champion of working people against the wealthy Few”? What were you thinking? The new Democratic Party Senate Minority Leader isn’t a liberal or progressive Democrat like Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, or Bernie Sanders. It’s the arch-neoliberal Wall Street Charles Schumer (D-NY).

The House Minority Leader continues to be the decrepit, Botox-faced and dollar-drenched San Francisco pro-war corporate Democrat Nancy Pelosi, endorsed by the pathetic AFL-CIO over the longtime pro-union and heartland progressive Democrat Tim Ryan (D-OH) – a stark statement on the persistence of the old neoliberal regime atop the not-leftmost of the two major parties.

Why Not Rahm?

I know that the Sanders-affiliated Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN) is considered a top contender for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). But don’t be surprised if that falls through. He’s getting slammed for past association with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and for making some “anti-Israel” and anti-Zionist comments as a law student in the 1980s. Ellison’s ascendancy to the job of party chairman could cost the Democrats big money. CNN recently quoted one of the party’s biggest donors, Haim Saban, as saying that Ellison as “clearly an anti-Semitic and anti-Israel person.”

A better candidate for DNC chair is the right-wing arch-neoliberal pro-war Democrat, celebrated uber-asshole, and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel. He’s dying to get out of his current position atop a savagely unequal and murder-ravaged city that has gotten sick of his arrogant, tone-deaf, and authoritarian police-state corporatism. Besides being an open Zionist strongly linked to Israel, Emmanuel has a prior track record as a successful corporate fundraiser for Bill Clinton and former Chicago Mayor Richie Daley. While serving in Congress, he headed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and was seen as the “brains and brawn” behind the Democrats’ take-back of the U.S. House in 2006. “Rhambo” funneled boatloads of cash to right-wing “Blue Dog” and pro-war Democrats, making sure that antiwar progressives in the party were defeated in the primaries. Three years later, as Obama’s Chief of Staff, he used legendary verbal abuse and threats of political retaliation to keep progressive Democrats and activists on board with the militantly neoliberal and imperial trajectory of the Obama administration.

For Emmanuel, the main enemy has always been those to his left, not the Republicans. Keeping even slightly progressive, mildly left-leaning sorts down and out has always been one of his top priorities.

“The Inauthentic Opposition”

Surprised at the ease and grace with which Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and other top Dems have been eager to hand power over to the noxious, quasi-fascist white nationalist and sexist bigot Donald Trump? You shouldn’t be. Near the end of the George W. Bush presidency, the left political scientist Sheldon Wolin captured the depressing nothingness of the dismal dollar Dems in the neoliberal era:

“The Democrats’ politics might be described as inauthentic opposition in the era of Superpower. Having fended off its reformist elements and disclaimed the label of liberal, it is trapped by new rules of the game which dictate that a party exists to win elections rather than to promote a vision of the good society…Should Democrats somehow be elected, corporate sponsors make it politically impossible for the new officeholders to alter significantly the direction of society. At best Democrats might repair some of the damage done to environmental safeguards or to Medicare without substantially reversing the drift rightwards. By fostering an illusion among the powerless classes that the party can make their interests a priority, it pacifies and thereby defines the style of an opposition party in an inverted totalitarian system…While the Republican party is ever vigilant about the care and feeding of its zealots, the Democratic Party is equally concerned to discourage its democrats…The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that for the poor, minorities, the working class, anticorporatists there is no opposition party working on their behalf…By ignoring dissent and assuming that the dissenters have no alternative, the party serves an important…stabilizing function and in effect marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.”

Junior Partner Service and “Peak Neoliberalism”

Wolin’s dark musings from early 2008 seem more than a little prophetic eight years later. Yes, milquetoast center Democrats were “somehow elected” in 2006 (the House) and 2008 (Obama in the White House and a new Democratic majority in the US. Senate). George W. Bush’s fiasco in Iraq and the onset of the financial crisis saw to that, kind of like Watergate and the great economic stagnation of the mid-1970s helped put the centrist Big Business Democrat Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1976 – and like how the recession of 1991-92 (and Ross Perot) helped put the centrist Big Business Democrat Bill Clinton in the White House in 1992. What followed presidential victories for Carter, Clinton, and Obama was the standard corporate-neoliberal manipulations of campaign populism and identity politics in service to the usual big money bankrollers and to global empire – to capitalism and its evil win imperialism (with underlying white supremacism and sexism unchallenged).

There were mild “repairs” at best as “the drift rightwards” continued. If anything, Wall Street’s takeover of Washington and the related imperial agenda of the Pentagon and the Council on Foreign Relations were advanced more effectively and extensively by Clinton and Obama than they could have been by Republican presidents.

Progressive Democrats and their lingering “vision of a good society” were kept in check as the neoliberal Democrats depressed and demobilized their party’s purported popular base. The natural consequence was that the “inauthentic opposition” party handed power back to the more openly right-wing major party (hated by most of the populace), in 1980, 2000 (with some help from the Supreme Court), and now again this year. It’s an old and pathetic story.

Obama and Hillary telling folks to “give [the ugly white nationalist ogre Donald] Trump a chance” makes perfect sense. They and other top Democrats are allied with the Republicans in the longstanding top down neoliberal class war on workers, the poor, and the even just slightly progressive left. They are counterfeit progressives by Deep State design.

The terrible and vapid 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign was an epitome of the Wolin’s “timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts.” It was a ruling class success. It defeated a progressive-reformist uprising within its own party – that of the Sandernistas, many of whom were far more left and militant than their timid and not-so “democratic socialist” hero Saint Bernard (who never really went for the jugular against the Clinton machine) Having made sure that the party remained one of “inauthentic opposition” devoid of any remotely serious “vision of the good society,” the Clintons and their DNC have helped the Democrats resume their normal neoliberal-era role as an out-of-power junior partner to the in-power radically reactionary and regressive Republicans.

The customary surrender and betrayal was executed under the fake-liberal cover of an especially noxious, classist, and vapid variant of identity politics. As Conor Lynch noted last month on Salon, “the Clinton campaign tried to make this election all about Trump’s hatefulness (‘Love Trumps Hate’) and his ‘basket of deplorables,’ while offering no real vision of progressive and populist change. And when those on the left raised legitimate concerns about Clinton’s uninspiring message or her political baggage during and after the primaries, they were ridiculously labeled sexist or racist ‘bros’ by establishment figures (even though some of Clinton’s harshest progressive critics were in fact women and people of color). In a February essay, former Salon writer Daniel Denvir described this cynical political strategy in Salon as ‘peak neoliberalism, where a distorted version of identity politics is used to defend an oligarchy and a national security state, celebrating diversity in the management of exploitation and warfare.’”

Hillary’s Hidden Success

Nobody who knows the truth about the Clintons and the other dismal, demobilizing and dollar- doused sham liberals atop the Democratic Party should doubt that Hillary’s top job was to keep the Democrats under the reign of the nation’s unelected and interrelated Deep State dictatorships of money and empire. Or that she preferred defeating Sanders and then losing the general election to Trump over losing to Sanders and Bernie then defeating Trump. Sanders would have stood a better chance of defeating Trump than Hillary but a reformist and half-progressive Sanders presidency (mild and hedged-in as it would have been) would not have pleased the Democrats’ corporate, finance-led sponsors. It was her task to prevent such an atrocity – and here she succeeded.

Sure, Mrs. Clinton would have loved to claim the presidency but it wasn’t in the cards and there was no way in Hell she was about to move as far toward “good society” reformism as would have been required – even just in campaign rhetoric – for her to defeat Trump. The arch-classist former Goldwater Girl just didn’t have that in her. It’s not who she is.

Still, she has the bragging rights on the popular vote. And she did her first job, which was to defeat the progressives and keep the Democrats a party of “inauthentic opposition.” She avoided the ultimate failure and humiliation, which would have been handing the Democratic Party over to hated progressive insurgents in its own ranks. That part of her mission was accomplished.

]]>Vijay Prashadhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889132016-12-07T18:03:24Z2016-12-09T08:58:55ZMore]]>Fidel Castro died at age 90. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States and Cuban exiles had tried for decades to kill him. In the U.S. Congress’ Church Committee Report (1975), U.S. politicians wrote: “The proposed assassination devices ran the gamut from high-powered rifles to poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powders and other devices which strain the imagination.” One of these devices was an exploding cigar, which was to be given to Castro at the United Nations. None of these succeeded. In April 1959, when Castro visited New York, he marvelled at the headline of an American paper: “All Police on Alert—Plot to Kill Castro!” The Cuban leader ducked all these attempts, 634 by one count. He gave up smoking in 1985 and suffered poor health over his last decade. It was old age that took him, not the wiles of the CIA.

Cuba’s new revolutionary government in 1959 made noises that sounded awfully familiar to the elites in Washington, D.C. They did not hear echoes from the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the USSR) since Castro had not made his intentions towards communism clear. What they found objectionable was Castro’s agenda: to conduct land reforms, to expropriate the entrenched elite and to expel the American mafia. The template for the U.S.’ displeasure at the Castro government was set in Guatemala, where the CIA conducted a coup in 1954 against the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz. His crime was land reform and protection of workers’ rights, both anathema to the old rural elites and the U.S.-based United Fruit Company. When Arbenz’s nationalist government went to work, the CIA planned to assassinate leading figures in his government and to allow its proxies to start an armed struggle. In 1952, the CIA created a “disposal list” containing the names of 58 leaders in the country. The text on assassination is chillingly precise: “The simplest tools are often the most efficient means of assassination,” the CIA wrote, pointing towards hammers, axes, wrenches, lamp stands “or anything hard, heavy and handy”. The CIA also primed its agent on the ground, Carlos Castillo Armas, who had no qualms about brutality. “If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it,” Armas said, “I will not hesitate to do it.” Arbenz was dispatched in a coup in 1954. Castro’s fate, by 1960, was to be the same.

Castro saw what the U.S. would try to do as he moved on his socialist programme. He had seen what happened to Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and to Arbenz in 1954, and he watched as the U.S. helped overthrow Brazil’s Joao Goulart in 1964 and intervened in the Dominican Republic in 1965 to prevent the restoration of the democratically elected government of Juan Bosch. In Africa, most spectacularly, the West and a section of the Congolese military assassinated the democratically elected President Patrice Lumumba. These men were not communists but liberal, anti-colonial nationalists. Their liberal nationalism pitted them against local elites and U.S. multinational corporations, at whose behest the U.S. government acted to prevent them from being in power. A decade later, when other nationalists attempted to come to power in Central America—from El Salvador to Nicaragua—they faced the same fate. Castro was their beacon. Cuba had escaped the dragnet of imperialism.

Castro knew that the CIA would not be able to do in Cuba what it had done in Guatemala. In October 1959, Castro met with the Soviet intelligence agent Aleksandr Alekseyev. Alekseyev, a veteran KGB agent, reported to Moscow that Castro had presciently told him: “All U.S. attempts to intervene are condemned to failure.” Why was Castro so certain of his position? The Cubans knew that over 90 per cent of the population had supported the revolution against the dictator Fulgencio Batista. The encrusted elite fled rapidly to the U.S., 144 kilometres away, where they set up shop in Miami’s new Little Havana. The CIA went to work amongst these exiles to find a Castillo Armas to lead the revolt against Castro and to find an assassin to kill him. When the CIA-backed exiles tried to invade Cuba in April 1961, they were routed by the Cuban forces and the armed Cuban population at the Bay of Pigs. The attention now went towards the assassination of Castro, which would sow chaos and allow a U.S.-backed force to seize power. That was the hope.

In April 1960, the U.S. State Department created a memorandum on Cuba. It found that “the majority of Cubans support Castro” and that “there is no effective political opposition” on the island. Communist influence, the memorandum noted, was “pervading the government and the body politic at an amazingly fast rate”. What could the U.S. do to undermine the Castro government on behalf of the old Cuban elites and the U.S.-based corporations? “The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support,” wrote the State Department’s Lester D. Mallory, “is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” The U.S. government must, therefore, use “every possible means” to “weaken the economic life of Cuba”. Castro knew this. During his meeting with Alekseyev, Castro said that he did worry about Cuba’s economy.

As with many colonies, Cuba had been forced into a one-crop economy, in its case sugar. The Batista government had relied upon sale of sugar to the U.S. and on tourism from the U.S. Both would have to end if Cuba was to succeed. “The only danger for the Cuban Revolution,” Castro told Alekseyev, “is Cuba’s economic weakness and its economic dependence on the U.S., which could use sanctions against Cuba. In one or two years, the U.S. could destroy the Cuban economy.” In October 1960, almost two years after Castro came to power, the U.S. Congress decided to embargo exports to Cuba. This blockade (el bloqueo) was extended in 1962 to basically throttle the island.

What saved Cuba was that Castro’s government had the support of the island’s people and the Soviet Union, which provided Cuba with material assistance. Castro told Alekseyev in 1959: “Never, even under mortal danger, will we make a deal with American imperialism.” Instead, Cuba turned to the USSR for assistance. This assistance, which included military protection, would last until the USSR collapsed in 1991. In a stroke, Cuba lost its market for sugar and its supplier of foodstuffs and fuel. The U.S. saw an opening. The U.S. Congress tightened the noose. The Torricelli Act (Cuban Democracy Act of 1992) and the Helms-Burton Act (Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996) extended the embargo to include foreign companies. Cuba was isolated. It was during this Special Period that Cuba had to be innovative: reusing, repairing and recycling its products. It was a difficult time, and yet the Cuban Revolution did not collapse. It did not follow the USSR into oblivion. “Why did we resist?” Castro asked a decade later. “Because the Revolution always had, has, and increasingly will have the support of a nation, an intelligent populace, which is increasingly united, educated and combative.”

Every chink in the armour is an opening for the U.S. to insinuate itself against the Revolution. Castro had aggravated the U.S. by providing material assistance to national liberation forces across Africa and Latin America and medical and educational aid to his neighbours in the Caribbean. Castro took a leadership role in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which Cuba hosted in 1979 and 2006, and in the more radical Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAL), which is based in Havana. Cuba did not retreat into a shell. It went outwards, building solidarity networks across the world to help it break the embargo. In fact, during the Special Period, the Indian communist movement raised 10,000 tonnes of wheat and 10,000 tonnes of rice, which were shipped to Cuba. Each Cuban received a loaf of bread from that shipment. Castro would call the Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet the “Bread Man”. Such solidarity, in material and moral terms, kept Cuba going and allowed it to stand firm against U.S. pressure. When NAM became pliant and OSPAAL became dormant, Cuba turned towards the “pink tide” in Latin America—with the rise of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales providing a new fillip to Cuban ambitions. The weakness of the “pink tide” threatens to push Cuba once more into isolation.

Castro outlasted 11 U.S. Presidents, including Barack Obama. The Americans reached out to Cuba, via the Vatican, to begin diplomatic relations. Castro’s brother Raul accepted the invitation to a dialogue partly to break out of the isolation. There was no clear sign, however, that the U.S. wanted to invalidate its 60-year history of supporting Cuban exiles and big corporations who are eager to exploit the Cuban landscape and its population. The talks between the countries produced no real breakthrough. Some gestures were allowed, such as the start of some direct flights between the U.S. and Cuba. Also, Obama restored diplomatic relations between the countries in 2015: The Cuban embassy opened in Washington, D.C., on July 20 and the the U.S. embassy opened in Havana in August with Secretary of State John Kerry there for the raising of the flag. Obama became the first sitting U.S. President to visit Havana after the 1959 Revolution when he made a trip in March 2016.

Nothing more was on the table. But even these small moves are now to be rolled back by the administration of Donald Trump. Trump believes that the death of Castro will hasten the end of the Cuban Revolution. The U.S., which had wanted to assassinate Castro all these decades, has come to believe that the Revolution is merely his fancy and not a commitment of the Cuban people. Trump will squeeze the Cubans for more concessions until the negotiations will break down. There is no appetite in Washington for peace. In one of his last pieces in Granma, Castro wrote of the “uncertain destiny of the human species”. He worried about the ascension of Trump and other like-minded politicians, but he also worried about the policies of Obama. None portend well for the planet. Trump and Obama might appear different, Castro suggested, but they are united in their fealty to the U.S., the “most powerful imperialist country that has ever existed”. Both Trump and Obama, wrote the old revolutionary on his deathbed, “will have to be given a medal of clay”. The earth cannot afford to give them anything else. They have already laid claim to everything.

]]>Michael Hudson - Sharmini Perieshttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889702016-12-08T21:47:05Z2016-12-09T08:58:52ZMore]]>SHARMINI PERIES: Come January 20th Donald Trump is placed to take power in Washington D.C., and there’s one thing that everyone is wondering about is what kind of economic policies will he implement that we should really worry about it. Well there’s been one economist, Michael Hudson, who’s been thinking hard and taking a close look on the economics profession and how it misleads the general public in favor of the top 1%.

Michael Hudson joins us today to talk about his forthcoming book, J is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Survival in an Age of Deception. Michael is a is a distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City Thanks Michael for joining us.

HUDSON: Killing the Host was a historical narrative of how the financial sector rose to power, and how it sought to take over government and resist the tendency to democratization by restoring a financial oligarchy. Europe’s 1848 revolutions sought to free economies from landlords, monopolies and the banks. By the late 19th century there was a counter-move in economics that redefined the idea of free markets.

When Adam Smith and John Stewart Mill and even Marx wrote about free markets, they meant a market free from the idle rich. These were primarily the idle landlords who collected land rent on a hereditary basis without working. Also, financers and the bankers, who had long insisted that governments create monopolies to give them in lieu of debt repayment.

The whole idea of industrial capitalism was to get free from these unnecessary costs. An economy doesn’t need a landlord class to collect rent. It doesn’t need monopoly rent. But around the late 19th century the landlords fought back and they claimed there was no such thing as unearned income. They claimed that rentiers were productive, not parasitic.

The essence of classical economics was to say there’s a difference between value and price. Value is what it really costs to produce goods and services. This cost can be expressed in terms of what it costs to hire labor at a living wage. Everything that’s not a real cost is just a privilege, a legal right to put up a toll booth and extract rent.

Killing the Host describes how the fight against classical economic reform was waged politically. I focus on what has happened since Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan introduced neoliberalism, followed by the Clintons, by Tony Blair in England, and by most of Europe today. J is for Junk Economics describes how the economic vocabulary has been turned around in an Orwellian way to mean the opposite of what words used to mean. A free market now means a market free for the landlords to charge whatever they want. Free for the monopolists to charge whatever they want. Free from regulation.

The neoliberal intent is to create a perverse methodology. I know that “methodology” is a technical word. What I mean by it is the creation of a deceptive way of looking at the economy. Today’s national income statistics, for instance, make it appear that Goldman Sachs is productive. As if Donald Trump plays a productive role. The aim is to make it appear that people who take money from the rest of the economy without working are productive, despite not really providing any service that actually contributes to GDP and economic growth.

People think that this concept of GDP is scientific economics, partly because it has a precise number and can be quantified. But the underlying concept of “the market” makes it appear as if today’s poverty is natural. It makes it appear that Goldman Sachs and Donald Trump are job creators instead of job destroyers. That is illogical, when you think about it.

So I talk about the vocabulary. It’s an A to Z vocabulary that goes over all of the concepts you need to know in order to pierce through the Orwellian rhetoric that passes for mainstream economics today. Mainstream economics has pretty much turned into junk economics. For instance, one example is the idea is that rent is perfectly natural to be paid. Neoliberals argue that a well run economy should have no government at all, but should shift all the economic planning to Wall Street, to the City of London, or Paris or other financial centers. Let financial managers do the planning, because they are the most productive people in the world – while government is just a deadweight bureaucracy.

This is the opposite of what was believed 100 years ago. I think I said before on this program that the first business school economics professor in the 19th century, at the Wharton School of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, was Simon Patton. He defined public infrastructure – the public option, such as roads and other transportation – as a 4th factor of production. The biggest capital investment in every country is what governments spend on roads, water and sewer infrastructure, basic communications, telephone systems, natural resources, and of course land. All these things are being privatized now. But the aim under government ownership – under a public option, like public health in Europe – is to lower the cost of living, lower the cost of doing business, so as to make the economy more competitive.

By contrast, under Thatcherism or Clintonism (or whatever you want to call it), the idea is to turn infrastructure, roads and even the sidewalks over to the monopolists financed by Wall Street. They then begin charging rent as an access fee. The result is to make America a high cost economy. So when Donald Trump come sin and says that he’ going to make America great again, what he means is competitive again. But how can you make it competitive if you make Americans pay so much more in healthcare? They now pay as much in healthcare as an Asian would earn in an entire year. If you were to give Americans all their food and clothing, and everything they buy and self for nothing, they still couldn’t compete. That’s because of all the costs that wage earners have to pay out of their wages, but other countries provide by their government: government healthcare, government services, government roads and so forth.

This was America’s economic development strategy in the 19th century. It’s what made the United States the most competitive country in the world, and enabled it to undersell others. It’s also what made Germany competitive. It’s what made Japan competitive. But all this is being undone now, as if the world that existed before 1980 – before Margaret Thatcher, before Ronald Reagan, even before Bill Clinton – didn’t really exist. There’s been an expurgation of the basic tools of economic thought, of the vocabulary that was developed to distinguish between profits that are actually earned on capital investment and hiring people as compared to economic rent, which is a toll booth to extort money over and above the actual cost of production.

PERIES: You said something really important, which is that people (at least in this election cycle) started to believe that Donald Trump was a job creator rather than a job destroyer. What did you mean by that, and how have people been led down the garden path?

HUDSON: I didn’t mean that they actually believed that he is a job creator. He wanted to convince them that he was a job creator. And it’s true, he did hire a lot of workers and contractors. But probably not as many jobs as were lost by people gambling at his resorts. I teach at Kansas City, and one student did a study of why people go bankrupt there. It turns out that they have a ship that is docked in the river, and people can go and gamble. Most of the people who who have declared bankruptcy have found themselves in a financial squeeze where they can’t afford to pay their rent. They lost their jobs. They think that there’s only one way to be able to pay the rent and not be out in the street. They’ve got to play for a 100 to 1 payoff. If they lose, it’s that or nothing.

So for them it’s actually rational. They’re probably going to lose, but the only way they can keep their head above water is to win the lottery. But of course, most end up losing. So Donald Trump’s hope is to convince workers that perhaps they can be a millionaire – and if they win the lottery, wouldn’t they like not to be taxed? If so, then be nice to today’s millionaires, because you might win the lottery and rise out of the working class.

That’s the illusion of “labor capitalism.” It’s a nice trick if you can pull it off. But I think it’s a myth – one that people want to believe. Lobbyists who represent Wall Street elites and the real estate interests want to promote the hope among voters that they might become capitalists, at least in miniature. But Donald Trump’s father started him out with a few million. The odds are stacked against most people. A good economic theory would show how these odds are stacked against them. It would show why people are getting poorer and poorer since 2008.

For the last 8 years, the Obama administration has overseen a long downturn for 95% of the population. All the growth has been at the top 5%. We’ve got to show them this fact.

PERIES: Yet when we heard President Obama speaking at various rallies to support Clinton’s candidacy, in terms of his own legacy, all he talked about was how much better off we are in terms of what he inherited in 2008. Which is true?

HUDSON: I think that Obama’s attempt to put a happy face on most peoples’ poverty was the kiss of death for Hillary. That was what lost her the election. Imagine Hillary going to the country and saying, just think of how much better off you are than you were 8 years ago. Most people must have thought, “Wait a minute! I’m not better off. I’m worse off. My real wages have gone down.” Indeed, if you’re 95 out of 100 Americans, your real wages have gone down. You’re being squeezed by healthcare. Your housing costs are going up. All your costs are going up, while your working conditions are getting worse. I think most voters thought, “I’m not better off at all. What is this? Who are Hillary and Obama trying to kid?”

Their feeling was one of revolt. So they said, “They can’t fool me anymore. No matter how bad the opposite party is, we’ve got to throw them out. Even if we can’t vote for someone good, at least we can keep throwing out the bad guys.” Maybe like on a roulette wheel, a good candidate may come along going some day, like a winning number.

Unfortunately that’s not how it works.

PERIES: So let’s talk about the kind of mythologies that are being sold to the people, like what I was just talking about in terms of President Obama on the campaign trail telling people that they’re better off than they really are. How are they being sold these mythologies, and what are some of the terminologies that you cover in your book that tricks people into believing what they’re being told?

HUDSON: One way that he tries to convince them that they’re better off is to cite the statistic that GDP, gross domestic product, is going up. It’s true. For the overall economy, gross domestic product actually has gone up since 2008. The problem is, it’s only gone up for 5% of the population. But it’s gone up so much for Wall Street, so much for 5% of the population, that it’s larger than the decline suffered by the 95%.

I don’t know if I’ve talked about this on your show before, but I was just in Germany at an archeological conference where we were talking about the Roman empire turning into the Dark Age and feudalism. One critic said that there’s been a new economic approach, a new economic archeology. In this new view, there really wasn’t a Dark Age, because it turns out they’ve found so much luxury trade among the very rich – the landowners and warlords – that despite the fact the population was being turned into serfs, the rich were doing quite fine. Archaeologists have found nice pottery and luxury at the top of the pyramid. There was so much money that maybe there was actual growth. So they call transition to serfdom and just peonage for the population “growth,” because so much wealth was being squeezed out for the top.

The question is, is that really growth, or not? If President Obama and Hillary convince people that GDP is going up but you haven’t shared in it, something is wrong with you. This is a “blame the victim” rhetoric. She’s blaming the victims for not participating in the growth that was enjoyed by Goldman Sachs and Wall Street, by Chase Manhattan and other bankers that were not thrown in jail.

Most people didn’t want to think of themselves as victims, and they thought that Donald Trump was going to do something about them apart from just making himself rich.

PERIES: Right. And why is it that you blame the Obama period for this, because he actually did inherit terrible economy in a depression.

HUDSON: The reason he’s so much worse than President Bush or even President Clinton is that 2008 was a potential turning point. When you look at who are the great presidents in history, you really think about who was a president during a great war or other turning point. Obama promised hope and change. But that was all demagogy. He didn’t bring about any hope and change. Or rather, the hope was for Wall Street. He delivered his constituency to his Wall Street backers. Instead of making a change, he turned the economy over to Wall Street. He turned the treasury over to Robert Rubin and his Wall Street gang who had supported Bill Clinton. Rubin had taken over the most corrupt bank in the country, Citigroup. Sheila Bair at the FDIC wanted to close it down and turn it into a public option. But Obama turned over the Justice Department to Wall Street factotums like Eric Holder, who refused to put any of the crooked bankers in jail.

So basically, Obama made it appear as if he was representing the people where he slammed down hard on them. Just as he slammed down on them in his work in Chicago when he gentrified the city’s black neighborhood, making billions of dollars in real estate gains for the Pritzker and Crown families. He was able to deliver his constituency to his backers, using false promises and a “golden tongue.”

]]>Mark Ameshttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889602016-12-08T20:14:00Z2016-12-09T08:58:32ZMore]]>Last month, the Washington Post gave a glowing front-page boost to an anonymous online blacklist of hundreds of American websites, from marginal conspiracy sites to flagship libertarian and progressive publications. As Max Blumenthal reported for AlterNet, the anonymous website argued that all of them should be investigated by the federal government and potentially prosecuted under the Espionage Act as Russian spies, for wittingly or unwittingly spreading Russian propaganda.

My own satirical newspaper was raided and closed down by the Kremlin in 2008, on charges of “extremism”—akin to terrorism—which I took seriously enough to leave for home for good. What the Washington Post did in boosting an anonymous blacklist of American journalists accused of criminal treason is one of the sleaziest, and most disturbing (in a very familiar Kremlin way) things I’ve seen in this country since I fled for home. The WaPo is essentially an arm of the American deep state; its owner, Jeff Bezos, is one of the three richest Americans, worth $67 billion, and his cash cow, Amazon, is a major contractor with the Central Intelligence Agency. In other words, this is as close to an official US government blacklist of journalists as we’ve seen—a dark ominous warning before they take the next steps.

It’s now been a few days, and the shock and disgust is turning to questions about how to fight back—and who we should be fighting against. Who were the Washington Post’s sources for their journalism blacklist?

Smearing a progressive journalism icon

The WaPo smear was authored by tech reporter Craig Timberg, a former national security editor who displayed embarrassing deference to the head of the world’s largest private surveillance operation, billionaire Eric Schmidt—in contrast to his treatment of his journalism colleagues. There’s little in Timberg’s history to suggest he’d lead one of the ugliest public smears of his colleagues in decades. Timberg’s father, a successful mainstream journalist who recently died, wrote hagiographies on his Naval Academy comrades including John McCain, the Senate’s leading Russophobic hawk, and three Iran-Contra conspirators—Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Robert McFarlane, whose crimes Timberg blames on their love of country and sacrifices in Vietnam.

WaPo’s key source was an anonymous online group calling itself PropOrNot (i.e., “Propaganda Or Not”). It was here that the blacklist of American journalists allegedly working with the Kremlin was posted. The Washington Post cited PropOrNot as a credible source, and granted them the right to anonymously accuse major American news outlets of treason, recommending that the government investigate and prosecute them under the Espionage Act for spreading Russian propaganda.

Featured alongside those anonymously accused of treason by PropOrNot, among a long list of marginal conspiracy sites and major news hubs, is Truthdig. This news and opinion site was co-founded by Zuade Kaufman and the veteran journalist Robert Scheer, who is a professor of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and former columnist for the LA Times. It would not be the first time Scheer has come under attack from dark forces. In the mid-late 1960s, Scheer made his fame as editor and reporter for Ramparts, the fearless investigative magazine that changed American journalism. One of the biggest bombshell stories that Scheer’s magazine exposed was the CIA’s covert funding of the National Student Association, then America’s largest college student organization, which had chapters on 400 campuses and a major presence internationally.

The CIA was not pleased with Scheer’s magazine’s work, and shortly afterwards launched a top-secret and illegal domestic spying campaign against Scheer and Ramparts, believing that they must be a Russian Communist front. A secret team of CIA operatives—kept secret even from the rest of Langley, the operation was so blatantly illegal—spied on Scheer and his Ramparts colleagues, dug through Ramparts’ funders lives and harassed some of them into ditching the magazine, but in all of that they couldn’t find a single piece of evidence linking Scheer’s magazine to Kremlin agents. This secret illegal CIA investigation into Scheer’s magazine expanded its domestic spying project, code-named MH-CHAOS, that grew into a monster targeting hundreds of thousands of Americans, only to be exposed by Seymour Hersh in late 1974, leading to the creation of the Church Committee hearings and calls by Congress for the abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It’s one of the dark ugly ironies that 50 years later, Scheer has been anonymously accused of working for Russian spies, only this time the accusers have the full cooperation of the Washington Post’s front page.

PropOrNot’s Ukrainian fascist salute

Still the question lingers: Who is behind PropOrNot? Who are they? We may have to await the defamation lawsuits that are almost certainly coming from those smeared by the Post and by PropOrNot. Their description sounds like the “About” tab on any number of Washington front groups that journalists and researchers are used to coming across:

“PropOrNot is an independent team of concerned American citizens with a wide range of backgrounds and expertise, including professional experience in computer science, statistics, public policy, and national security affairs.”

The only specific clues given were an admission that at least one of its members with access to its Twitter handle is “Ukrainian-American”. They had given this away in a handful of early Ukrainian-language tweets, parroting Ukrainian ultranationalist slogans, before the group was known.

One PropOrNot tweet, dated November 17, invokes a 1940s Ukrainian fascist salute “Heroiam Slava!!” to cheer a news item on Ukrainian hackers fighting Russians. The phrase means “Glory to the heroes” and it was formally introduced by the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) at their March-April 1941 congress in Nazi occupied Cracow, as they prepared to serve as Nazi auxiliaries in Operation Barbarossa. As historian Grzgorz Rossoliński-Liebe, author of the definitive biography on Ukraine’s wartime fascist leader and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, explained:

“the OUN-B introduced another Ukrainian fascist salute at the Second Great Congress of the Ukrainian Nationalists in Cracow in March and April 1941. This was the most popular Ukrainian fascist salute and had to be performed according to the instructions of the OUN-B leadership by raising the right arm ‘slightly to the right, slightly above the peak of the head’ while calling ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ (Slava Ukraїni!) and responding ‘Glory to the Heroes!’ (Heroiam Slava!).”

Two months after formalizing this salute, Nazi forces allowed Bandera’s Ukrainian fascists to briefly take control of Lvov, at the time a predominantly Jewish and Polish city—whereupon the Ukrainian “patriots” murdered, tortured and raped thousands of Jews, in one of the most barbaric and bloodiest pogroms ever.

Since coming to power in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, Ukraine’s US-backed regime has waged an increasingly surreal war on journalists who don’t toe the Ukrainian ultranationalist line, and against treacherous Kremlin propagandists, real and imagined. Two years ago, Ukraine established a “Ministry of Truth”. This year the war has gone from surreal paranoia to an increasingly deadly kind of “terror.”

One of the more frightening policies enacted by the current oligarch-nationalist regime in Kiev is an online blacklist of journalists accused of collaborating with pro-Russian “terrorists.” The website, “Myrotvorets” or “Peacemaker”—was set up by Ukrainian hackers working with state intelligence and police, all of which tend to share the same ultranationalist ideologies as Parubiy and the newly-appointed neo-Nazi chief of the National Police.

Condemned by the Committee to Protect Journalists and numerous news organizations in the West and in Ukraine, the online blacklist includes the names and personal private information on some 4,500 journalists, including several western journalists and Ukrainians working for western media. The website is designed to frighten and muzzle journalists from reporting anything but the pro-nationalist party line, and it has the backing of government officials, spies and police—including the SBU (Ukraine’s successor to the KGB), the powerful Interior Minister Avakov and his notorious far-right deputy, Anton Geraschenko.

Ukraine’s journalist blacklist website—operated by Ukrainian hackers working with state intelligence—led to a rash of death threats against the doxxed journalists, whose email addresses, phone numbers and other private information was posted anonymously to the website. Many of these threats came with the wartime Ukrainian fascist salute: “Slava Ukraini!” [Glory to Ukraine!] So when PropOrNot’s anonymous “researchers” reveal only their Ukrainian(s) identity, it’s hard not to think about the spy-linked hackers who posted the deadly “Myrotvorets” blacklist of “treasonous” journalists.

The DNC’s Ukrainian ultra-nationalist researcher cries treason

Because the PropOrNot blacklist of American journalist “traitors” is anonymous, and the Washington Post front-page article protects their anonymity, we can only speculate on their identity with what little information they’ve given us. And that little bit of information reveals only a Ukrainian ultranationalist thread—the salute, the same obsessively violent paranoia towards Russia, and towards journalists, who in the eyes of Ukrainian nationalists have always been dupes and stooges, if not outright collaborators, of Russian evil.

One of the key media sources who blamed the DNC hacks on Russia, ramping up fears of crypto-Putinist infiltration, is a Ukrainian-American lobbyist working for the DNC. She is Alexandra Chalupa—described as the head of the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research on Russia and on Trump, and founder and president of the Ukrainian lobby group “US United With Ukraine Coalition”, which lobbied hard to pass a 2014 bill increasing loans and military aid to Ukraine, imposing sanctions on Russians, and tightly aligning US and Ukraine geostrategic interests.

In October of this year, Yahoo News named Chalupa one of “16 People Who Shaped the 2016 Election” for her role in pinning the DNC leaks on Russian hackers, and for making the case that the Trump campaign was under Kremlin control. “As a Democratic Party consultant and proud Ukrainian-American, Alexandra Chalupa was outraged last spring when Donald Trump named Paul Manafort as his campaign manager,” the Yahoo profile began. “As she saw it, Manafort was a key figure in advancing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agenda inside her ancestral homeland — and she was determined to expose it.”

Chalupa worked with veteran reporter Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News to publicize her opposition research on Trump, Russia and Paul Manafort, as well as her many Ukrainian sources. In one leaked DNC email earlier this year, Chalupa boasts to DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda that she brought Isikoff to a US-government sponsored Washington event featuring 68 Ukrainian journalists, where Chalupa was invited “to speak specifically about Paul Manafort.” In turn, Isikoff named her as the key inside source “proving” that the Russians were behind the hacks, and that Trump’s campaign was under the spell of Kremlin spies and sorcerers.

(In 2008, when I broke the story about the Manafort-Kremlin ties in The Nation with Ari Berman, I did not go on to to accuse him or John McCain, whose campaign was being run by Manafort’s partner, of being Manchurian Candidates under the spell of Vladimir Putin. Because they weren’t; instead, they were sleazy, corrupt, hypocritical politicians who followed money and power rather than principle. A media hack feeding frenzy turned Manafort from what he was—a sleazy scumbag—into a fantastical Kremlin mole, forcing Manafort to resign from the Trump campaign, thanks in part to kompromat material leaked by the Ukrainian SBU, successor to the KGB.)

Meanwhile, Chalupa’s Twitter feed went wild accusing Trump of treason—a crime that carries the death penalty. Along with well over 100 tweets hashtagged #TreasonousTrump Chalupa repeatedly asked powerful government officials and bodies like the Department of Justice to investigate Trump for the capital crime of treason. In the weeks since the election, Chalupa has repeatedly accused both the Trump campaign and Russia of rigging the elections, demanding further investigations. According to The Guardian, Chalupa recently sent a report to Congress proving Russian hacked into the vote count, hoping to initiate a Congressional investigation. In an interview with Gothamist, Chalupa described alleged Russian interference in the election result as “an act of war.”

To be clear, I am not arguing that Chalupa is behind PropOrNot. But it is important to provide context to the boasts by PropOrNot about its Ukrainian nationalist links—within the larger context of the Clinton campaign’s anti-Kremlin hysteria, which crossed the line into Cold War xenophobia time and time again, an anti-Russian xenophobia shared by Clinton’s Ukrainian nationalist allies. To me, it looks like a classic case of blowback: A hyper-nationalist group whose extremism happens to be useful to American geopolitical ambitions, and is therefore nurtured to create problems for our competitor. Indeed, the US has cultivated extreme Ukrainian nationalists as proxies for decades, since the Cold War began.

As investigative journalist Russ Bellant documented in his classic exposé, “Old Nazis, New Right,” Ukrainian Nazi collaborators were brought into the United States and weaponized for use against Russia during the Cold War, despite whatever role they may have played in the Holocaust and in the mass slaughter of Ukraine’s ethnic Poles. After spending so many years encouraging extreme Ukrainian nationalism, it’s no surprise that the whole policy is beginning to blow back.

WaPo’s other source: A loony, far-right eugenicist think tank

Besides PropOrNot, the Washington Post’s Craig Timberg relied on only one other source to demonstrate the influence of Russian propaganda: the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), whose “fellow” Clint Watts is cited by name, along with a report he co-authored, “Trolling for Trump: How Russia is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.”

Somehow, in the pushback and outrage over the WaPo blacklist story, the FPRI has managed to fly under the radar. So much so that when Fortune’s Matthew Ingram correctly described the FPRI as “proponents of the Cold War” he was compelled to issue a clarification, changing the description to “a conservative think tank known for its hawkish stance on relations between the US and Russia.”

In fact, historically the Foreign Policy Research Institute has been one of the looniest (and spookiest) extreme-right think tanks since the early Cold War days, promoting “winnable” nuclear war, maximum confrontation with Russia, and attacking anti-colonialism as dangerously unworkable. One of the key brains behind the FPRI’s extreme-right Cold War views also happened to be a former Austrian fascist official who, upon emigrating to America, became one of this country’s leading proponents of racial eugenics and white supremacy.

The Foreign Policy Research Institute was founded by Robert Strausz-Hupé and set up on the University of Pennsylvania campus, with backing from the Vick’s chemical company, funder of numerous reactionary rightwing causes since the New Deal began. And, as the New York Times reported, the FPRI also was covertly funded by the CIA, a revelation that would lead to student protests and the FPRI removing itself from Penn’s campus in 1970.

The FPRI’s founder, Strausz-Hupe, emigrated to the US from Austria in the 1920s. In the early Cold War years, he became known as an advocate of aggressive confrontation with the Soviet Union, openly advocating total nuclear war rather than anything like surrender or cohabitation. In a 1961 treatise “A Forward Strategy for America” that Strausz-Hupe co-authored with his frequent FPRI collaborator, the former Austrian fascist official and racial eugenics advocate Stefan Possony, they wrote:

“Even at a moment when the United States faces defeat because, for example, Europe, Asia and Africa have fallen to communist domination, a sudden nuclear attack against the Soviet Union could at least avenge the disaster and deprive the opponent of the ultimate triumph. While such a reversal at the last moment almost certainly would result in severe American casualties, it might still nullify all previous Soviet conquests.”

But it was Russian propaganda that most concerned Strausz-Hupe and his FPRI. In 1959, for example, he published a three-page spread in the New York Times, headlined “Why Russia Is Ahead in Propaganda,” that has odd echoes of last month’s paranoid Washington Post article alleging a vast conspiracy of American journalists secretly poisoning the public’s mind with Russian propaganda. The article argued, as many do today, that America and the West were dangerously behind the Russians in the propaganda arms race—and dangerously disadvantaged by our open and free society, where propaganda is allegedly sniffed out by our ever-vigilant and fearless media.

The only way for America to protect itself from Russian propaganda, he wrote, was to massively increase its propaganda warfare budgets, and close the alleged “propaganda gap”—echoing again the same solutions being peddled today in Washington and London:

“[W]ithin the limitations of our society, we can take steps to expand and improve our existing programs.

“These programs have been far from generous. It has been estimated, for example, that the Communists in one single propaganda offensive—the germ-warfare campaign during the Korean conflict—spent nearly as much as the entire annual allocation to the United States Information Agency. We should increase the austere budget of the U.S.I.A. We should give our information specialists a greater voice in policy-making councils. We should attempt to coordinate more fully and effectively the propaganda programs of the Western alliance.”

A few years later, the FPRI’s Strausz-Hupe published a deranged attack in the New York Times against Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, calling it “the most vicious attack to date launched by way of our mass media against the American military profession”. The FPRI’s founding director went further, accusing Kubrick of being, if not a conscious Russian agent of propaganda, then a Soviet dupe undermining American democracy and stability—the same sort of paranoid accusations that FPRI is leveling again today. As Strausz-Hupe wrote:

“Anyone who cares to scan the Soviet press and the Communist press in other lands will note that it is one of the principal Communist objectives to drive a wedge between the American people and their military leaders. Mr. Kubrick’s creation certainly serves this purpose.”

Reading that then, knowing how the Soviet Union eventually collapsed on itself without firing a shot—and seeing the same paranoid, sleazy lies being peddled again today, one is dumbstruck by just how stagnant our intellectual culture is. We’ve never thawed ourselves out from our Cold War pathologies; we’re still trapped in the same structures that nurture these pathologies. Too many careers and salaries depend on it…

But Strausz-Hupe was the voice of reason compared to his chief collaborator and co-author at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Stefan Possony. He too was an Austrian emigre, although Possony didn’t leave his homeland until 1938. Before then he served in the Austrofascist governments of both Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, but left after the Nazi Anschluss deposed the native fascists and installed Hitler’s puppets in their place.

Possony was a director and fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and according to historian Robert Vitalis’ recent book “White World Power” [Cornell University Press], Possony co-authored nearly all of the FPRI’s policy research material until he moved to Stanford’s Hoover Institute in 1961, where he helped align the two institutions. Possony continued publishing in the FPRI’s journal Orbis throughout the 1960s and beyond. He was also throughout this time one of the most prolific contributors to Mankind Quarterly, the leading race eugenics journal in the days before The Bell Curve—and co-author race eugenics books with white supremacist Nathaniel Weyl.

So even as he was publishing aggressive Cold War propaganda for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Possony wrote elsewhere that the “average African Negro functions as does the European after a leucotomy [prefrontal lobotomy] operation” In other articles, Possony described the people of “the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia” as “genetically unpromising“ because they “lack the innate brain power required for mastery and operation of the tools of modern civilization[.] . . .” For this reason he and Strausz-Hupe opposed the early Cold War policy of de-colonization: “The accretion of lethal power in the hands of nation states dominated by populations incapable of rational thought could be a harbinger of total disaster.” Instead, they argued that white colonialism benefited the natives and raised them up; western critics of colonialism, they argued, were merely “fashionable” dupes who would be responsible for a “genocide” of local whites.

As late as a 1974 article in Mankind Quarterly, Possony was defending race eugenics loon William Shockley’s theories on the inferiority of dark skinned races, which he argued could prove that spending money on welfare was in fact a “waste” since there was no way to improve genetically inferior races. Around the same time, Possony emerged as the earliest and most effective advocate of the “Star Wars” anti-ballistic missile system adopted by President Reagan. The way Possony saw it, the Star Wars weapon was entirely offensive, and would give the United States sufficient first strike capability to win a nuclear war with Russia.

It was this history, and a 1967 New York Times exposé on how the Foreign Policy Research Institute had been covertly funded by the CIA, that led US Senator Fulbright in 1969 to reject Nixon’s nomination of Strausz-Hupe as ambassador to Morocco. Fulbright denounced Strausz-Hupe as a Cold War extremist and a threat to world peace: ”the very epitome of a hard-line, no compromise.” However, he gave in a couple of years later when Nixon named him to the post of ambassador in Sri Lanka.

This is the world the Washington Post is bringing back to its front pages. And the timing is incredible—as if Bezos’ rag has taken upon itself to soften up the American media before Trump moves in for the kill. And it’s all being done in the name of fighting “fake news” …and fascism.

“Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” Richard B. Spencer yelled in front of more than 200 attendees at his annual conference on November 19th, in the nation’s capitol. Several of his supporters then raised their right arms to give the Nazi salute. This video, taken by a reporter for The Atlantic, features Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute, a white-nationalist think-tank in Washington D.C. Spencer is known for having created the term “alt-right.” He is also known for advocating for “a peaceful ethnic cleansing” of the United States.

“America was, until this past generation, a white country designed for ourselves and for our posterity. It is our creation. It is our inheritance. And it belongs to us,” Spencer declared during his speech.

When I first watched Richard Spencer at his NPI annual conference, like many, I was horrified by Spencer’s intentional references to Nazi language, imagery and ideology. In this political moment, as President-Elect Trump appoints to his cabinet, a crew of known white supremacists: Stephen Bannon as Chief Strategist; Jeff Sessions (Attorney General); and Michael Flynn (National Security Adviser), Spencer’s Neo-Nazi D.C. conference takes on a whole new, chilling power—not of a fringe, right-wing hate group, but of a mainstream, right-wing hate group.

After absorbing the initial shock of his fascist message, what disturbed me next about Spencer’s speech caught me somewhat off guard. The philosophy he was espousing didn’t sound totally foreign. In fact, something about it felt sickeningly familiar, like a relic from childhood.

I grew up in one of the most right-wing states in the country: Oklahoma. Formerly Indian Territory, Oklahoma was first created by the US government as an official dumping grounds for indigenous nations that were standing in the way of “white progress.” Under the doctrines of Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny, the US government removed at gunpoint, dozens of indigenous nations from all over North America. They were sent in death marches, on foot and by boat, to Indian Territory, an area the US government viewed as a wasteland, a place where no one should survive. US Explorer Stephen Long referred to this area as the “Great American Desert.”

In total, 64 nations were forcibly removed to Indian Territory between 1831-1878. After the Removals, these nations, having survived near genocide, then endured POW camps, rotten food rations, smallpox, massacres, multiple invasions, multiple land sequestrations, the Boarding School era, the Dawes Act, the Allotment era, the Curtis Act, the Land Run era, commercial oil discoveries on their lands, and finally, the complete annihilation of reservation land that remained, when Oklahoma became a state. The fact that many of these tribal nations are still here today, after all of this history, is an incredible testament to their strength, determination, spirituality and cultural resilience. These nations have been decimated since European settlers set sight on their lands over 500 years ago. And Oklahoma Native tribes have continued to survive and thrive, no thanks to the US government, who broke every single one of the more than 500 treaties it made with sovereign nations.

Today, the Oklahoma tourism industry brags about the fact that Oklahoma is currently home 39 federally recognized tribes. But how those 39 tribes got to Oklahoma is still a giant mystery for many non-Native Oklahomans, whose public school textbooks were ethnically cleansed of non-white histories a few generations ago.

Instead, the state history we were taught as kids was much more in line with the Doctrine of Discovery, Oklahoma style. We were taught that white settlers “discovered” vast open prairies when they came to settle this (presumably) uninhabited area in the late 1800s. These vacant lands were then “opened up” for (white) settlement in a series of Land Runs and Land Lotteries, which schoolchildren in Oklahoma still proudly re-enact to this day, during Western Heritage Week. The US government was giving away “free land,” our teachers said. People traveled from all over the country to grab 160 acres and “stake their claim.” We were never taught, as kids, that this land was somebody else’s. We were never taught that this land was treaty-protected Indian Territory. Nor were we taught the concept of “settler colonialism,” a distinct type of imperialism practiced in many parts of the world, where settler societies invade and replace indigenous populations.

No, we didn’t learn any of this. Instead, we were taught to embody, celebrate and emulate a “white cultural mythology” designed to elevate European colonial history above all other histories. This narrative–based on Manifest Destiny, Westward Expansion, and the Doctrine of Discovery–placed European Americans at the very center of every story, as the primary actors, agents, and engines of Western civilization, development and progress. If any non-white histories were presented at all, they were peripheral to European history and not explored in any depth.

Our public education therefore served its primary function of patriotic indoctrination, creating an inflated sense of self-importance about European American history and white culture. For young white students, US history was served up as a myopic, self-congratulating, historical fantasy.

Without any kind of outside interference, I believe this one-sided view of history, projected some 10 or 15 years out, could easily manifest itself into a deeply-rooted sense of white superiority– a cultural mythology that goes something like this:

“America was, until this past generation, a white country designed for ourselves and for our posterity. It is our creation. It is our inheritance. And it belongs to us.”

These are, again, the words of Herbert Spencer– the white supremacist, Nazi-saluting president of the National Policy Institute, and poster child for the “alt-right” movement. The fact that I recognize his origin story as the same one I was taught at a young age, is a fact that I find terrifying.

Spencer’s rhetoric, unfortunately, is not (just) the lunatic ravings of a sociopathic madman. No, this is a man who believes he has integrity, a man who bases his (fascist) conclusions on a core set of values and beliefs that he has likely embraced throughout his life, beliefs that have been supported in some large way by his community, his education, and his culture, without any major interruption. His rhetoric is also the logical result of a US history narrative that has, for generations, boldly lied about how this country was formed.

Had we all been taught in public schools that our country was founded on genocide (which is ongoing), and built on slavery (which is still legal in some states), as US schoolchildren, we might have evolved very differently, with a much more humble and critical perspective on our nation’s history of white supremacist violence, and a realistic vision for a more peaceful and just future–starting with a national truth and reconciliation process.

Imagine the possibilities for national healing, if most Americans could agree on some universal truths about our nation’s origin story—a story that recognizes the many atrocities of its founding; a story that embraces at its core human rights for all people: indigenous peoples, Africans, poor people, and immigrants from every nationality, every faith/religion, from all over the world.

This kind of democratic history education is perhaps most famously demonstrated by Howard Zinn in his seminal work, A People’s History of the United States. If a history book like this were required reading in US public schools, it would have a profound national impact. For example, it would render absolutely false any cultural narratives about white people’s entitlement to land and its fortunes. And the racist notion of all non-whites as “foreigners” and “illegal immigrants” would also be unlikely, given that we would have a shared understanding of the many thriving, non-European societies that were productively living on this continent long before Columbus, and long before US boundaries were ever formed.

There are international educational models that can guide us in an effort to address the atrocities of our nation’s history. Germany, for example, has made great strides in integrating holocaust history into its national curriculum. South Africa created, in 2000, an Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR), with came out of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Process. The IJR “works with education officials and teachers, exploring two aspects – the impact of the past on teaching and teachers, as well as on how to teach a challenging ‘past’ in classrooms.” The US could learn a lot from these efforts. But without this kind of national process, we will continue to live in a country with extreme political factionalism and ideological polarization.

Furthermore, with a rapidly changing US demographic that will soon place European Americans in the minority population, the emerging fear for many white supremacists of losing racial power and privilege is already manifesting itself in a violent death grip. “A dying mule always kicks the hardest,” and so we see that white supremacist ideology is on the rise. We cannot censor Breitbart news, Fox news, and the National Policy Institute, but we can insist on dismantling white supremacist history. And we must.

In this moment, there’s little support for progressive history education on a national level. Even under Democratic administrations, the United States has long lacked the political will to institute a national Truth and Reconciliation Process for genocide or slavery. It has failed to acknowledge, let alone apologize, for these atrocities. And given the current direction of an incoming Trump administration, this kind of national healing is not even on the horizon.

And so we must take these fights to state and local levels. Our work is cut out for us. And one thing is painfully clear: Until we stop teaching history through a lens of white supremacy, Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and white supremacists like Richard Spencer will have a socially-sanctioned platform for a kind of fascism that should never be possible in a country that would dare to call itself a democracy.

“One of the best attributes of human beings is that they’re adaptable; one of the worst attributes of human beings is they are adaptable. They adapt and start to tolerate abuses, they adapt to being involved themselves in abuses, they adapt to adversity and they continue on.”

Barack Obama has been the ultimate President for the ruling elites. The dissonance between his charming persona and his often brutal agenda enabled him to enact right-wing policies that padded his backers’ pockets and fortified the clandestine, civil rights-nullifying powers of the state, much at the expense of American tax payers.

In a reality dictated by identity politics, Barack Obama has also served as the ultimate feel-good President for liberals and the media. They could continue with their lives virtually guilt-free, lazily in a sheltered cocoon, while falsely projecting “progress” onto the President’s eloquent speeches and dark complexion. Thus, it is no surprise that ruling elites, liberals and the media overconfidently expected Obama’s candidate of choice, Hillary Clinton, to succeed him in office.

However, on November 8th the true American experience finally caught up and shattered this delusion with the surprising defeat of Hillary Clinton and the ascendancy of Donald Trump. In the age of likes, shares and cyberbullying, Twitter outplayed mainstream media’s ability to accurately assess the public’s growing discontent with the neoliberal status quo. Newsweek even went so far as to prematurely celebrate Clinton’s victory in print with a now sought after collector’s item “Madam President” issue. Whether Donald Trump’s victory is legitimate or not does not change the fact that American elites, liberals and the media have been proven to be grossly out of touch.

As an Israeli-American with dual citizenship, the recent events in the United States evoke in me a sense of déjà vu, reminding me of the Israeli reality approximately ten years ago.

Ahead of the elections in 1996, Israel was still in a state of shock after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination on November 4th, 1995 by the right-wing settler fanatic Yigal Amir. Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu and Shimon Peres faced off in a campaign that was dismissed by elites, liberals and the media as an easy win for Peres. They viewed Bibi as a brash, opportunistic Jewish-supremacist whose incitement was partly responsible for Rabin’s assassination, and therefore his triumph was an unimaginable abomination. On election night, exit polls indicated a Peres win, though by morning Netanyahu was declared the victor by less than 1%, evoking the term “went to bed with Peres, woke up with Netanyahu”.

Upon Netanyahu’s election, Israeli elites, liberals and the media adopted a conciliatory approach, and decided to give him a chance. Many felt Bibi was relatively moderate compared to some of his coalition partners, which included extremists such as Rafael “Raful” Eitan, and the notorious Ariel Sharon. Thus, he consolidated power by galvanizing on their anxiety of the more extreme alternatives to his rule.

Ever since this surprising defeat, and in an attempt to remain relevant to large Jewish populations, Netanyahu’s opposition from the left compromises on its positions, resulting in a consistent and overall dramatic decline in its electoral power. More importantly, an agenda of equality and justice, once championed by the left, has been forgotten and even villainized; in present day Israel the Hebrew words for “left-wing” or “lefty” are derogatory, meaning loser or traitor.

Though there are obviously many differences in the populations and political landscapes of Israel and the United States, the Israeli example serves to demonstrate that once fundamental concessions are made and compromise is achieved by abandoning essential moral high ground, the battle is lost. There is no “let’s give him a chance and see” option. The battle is meaningless once these bargains are struck.

Just as Bibi appeared in 1996, Trump seems relatively moderate, or at least unpredictable, compared to his Nazi-saluting supporters and the company he keeps, which includes Breitbart’s Steve Bannon and James “Mad Dog” Mattis. However, as the 1996 Israeli example illustrates, it is crucial to judge Trump’s future administration by its most extreme components, not solely by Donald Trump himself or any of his more moderate cabinet appointments. In addition, fear of more radical alternatives, such as Vice President-elect Pence, must not produce subservience to Trump. For years Netanyahu has been appeasing his political partners by moving rightward, while holding on to power by frightening his opposition on the left.

As the Israeli example demonstrates, American elites, liberals and the media must quickly come to terms with a new and uncomfortable reality whereby they either actively resist the discriminatory and reactionary policies of a Trump administration from day one (and before), or compromise, resign and conform to them. There is no middle ground when facing assaults to hard-won and fundamental human rights. The fight for this country’s soul must be waged in solidarity with all minorities both here and abroad, uncompromisingly and unapologetically.

Their fate is the fate of America.

]]>Conn Hallinanhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889852016-12-09T00:27:32Z2016-12-09T08:58:18ZMore]]>President-elect Donald Trump’s off the cuff, chaotic approach to foreign policy had at least one thing going for it, even though it was more the feel of a blind pig rooting for acorns than a thought out international initiative. In speaking with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Trump said he wanted “to address and find solutions to the county’s [Pakistan’s] problems.”

Whether Trump understands exactly how dangerous the current tensions between Pakistan and India are, or if anything will come from the Nov. 30 exchange between the two leaders, is anyone’s guess, but it is more than the Obama administration has done over the past eight years, in spite of a 2008 election promise to address the on-going crisis in Kashmir.

And right now that troubled land is the single most dangerous spot on the globe.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars over the disputed province in the past six decades and came within a hair’s breathe of a nuclear exchange in 1999. Both countries are on a crash program to produce nuclear weapons, and between them they have enough explosive power to not only kill more than 20 million of their own people, but to devastate the world’s ozone layer and throw the Northern Hemisphere into a nuclear winter with a catastrophic impact on agriculture worldwide.

According to studies done at Rutgers, the University of Colorado-Boulder, and the University of California Los Angeles, if both countries detonated 100 Hiroshima size bombs, it would generate between 1 and 5 million tons of smoke that within 10 days would drive temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere down to levels too cold for wheat production in much of Canada and Russia. The resulting 10 percent drop in rainfall—particularly hard hit would be the Asian monsoon—would exhaust worldwide food supplies, leading to the starvation of up to 100 million plus people.

Aside from the food crisis, a nuclear war in South Asia would destroy between 25 to 70 percent of the Northern Hemisphere’s ozone layer, resulting in a massive increase in dangerous ultraviolent radiation.

Lest anyone think that the chances of such a war are slight, consider two recent developments.

One, a decision by Pakistan to deploy low-yield tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons and to give permission for local commanders to decide when to use them.

In an interview with the German newspaper Deutsche Welle, Gregory Koblentz of the Council on Foreign Relations warned that if a “commander of a forward-deployed nuclear armed unit finds himself in a ‘use it or lose it’ situation and about to be overrun, he might decided to launch his weapons.”

Pakistan’s current Defense Minister, Muhammad Asif, told Geo TV, “If anyone steps on our soil and if anyone’s designs are a threat to our security, we will not hesitate to use those [nuclear] weapons for our defense.”

Every few years the Pentagon “war games” a clash between Pakistan and India over Kashmir: every game ends in a nuclear war.

The second dangerous development is the “Cold Start” strategy by India that would send Indian troops across the border to a depth of 30 kilometers in the advent of a terrorist attack like the 1999 Kargill incident in Kashmir, the 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, or the 2008 attack on Mumbai that killed 166 people.

Since the Indian army is more than twice the size of Pakistan’s, there would be little that Pakistanis could do to stop such an invasion other than using battlefield nukes. India would then be faced with either accepting defeat or responding.

India does not currently have any tactical nukes, but only high yield strategic weapons—many aimed at China—whose primary value is to destroy cities. Hence a decision by a Pakistani commander to use a tactical warhead would almost surely lead to a strategic response by India, setting off a full-scale nuclear exchange and the nightmare that would follow in its wake.

With so much at stake, why is no one but a twitter-addicted foreign policy apprentice saying anything? What happened to President Obama’s follow through to his 2008 statement that the tensions over Kashmir “won’t be easy” to solve, but that doing so “is important”?

The initial strategy of pulling India into an alliance against China was dreamed up during the administration of George W. Bush, but it was Obama’s “Asia Pivot” that signed and sealed the deal. With it went a quid pro quo: if India would abandon its traditional neutrality, the Americans would turn a blind eye to Kashmir.

As a sweetener, the U.S. agreed to bypass the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement and allow India to buy uranium on the world market, something New Delhi had been banned from doing since it detonated a nuclear bomb in 1974 using fuel it had cribbed from U.S.-supplied nuclear reactors. In any case, because neither India nor Pakistan have signed the Agreement, both should be barred from buying uranium. In India’s case, the U.S. has waived that restriction.

The so-called 1-2-3 Agreement requires India to use any nuclear fuel it purchases in its civilian reactors, but frees it up to use its meager domestic supplies on its nuclear weapons program. India has since built two enormous nuclear production sites at Challakere and near Mysore, where, rumor has it, it is producing a hydrogen bomb. Both sites are off limits to international inspectors.

In 2008, when the Obama administration indicated it was interested in pursuing the 1-2-3 Agreement, then Pakistani Foreign minister Khurshid Kusuni warned that the deal would undermine the non-proliferation treaty and lead to a nuclear arms race in Asia. That is exactly what has come to pass. The only countries currently adding to their nuclear arsenals are Pakistan, India, China and North Korea.

While Pakistan is still frozen out of buying uranium on the world market, it has sufficient domestic supplies to fuel an accelerated program to raise its warhead production. Pakistan is estimated to have between 110 and 130 warheads and is projected to have 200 by 2020, surpassing Great Britain. India has between 110 and 120 nuclear weapons. Both countries have short, medium and long-range missiles, submarine ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles, plus nuclear-capable aircraft that can target each other’s major urban areas.

One problem in the current crisis is that both countries are essentially talking past one another.

Pakistan does have legitimate security concerns. It has fought and lost three wars with India over Kashmir since 1947, and it is deeply paranoid about the size of the Indian army.

But India has been the victim of several major terrorist attacks that have Pakistan’s fingerprints all over them. The 1999 Kargill invasion lasted a month and killed hundreds of soldiers on both sides. Reportedly the Pakistanis were considering arming their missiles with nuclear warheads until the Clinton administration convinced them to stand down.

Pakistan’s military has long denied that it has any control over terrorist organizations based in Pakistan, but virtually all intelligence agencies agree that, with the exception of the country’s home-grown Taliban, that is not the case. The Pakistani army certainly knew about a recent attack on an Indian army base in Kashmir that killed 19 soldiers.

In the past, India responded to such attacks with quiet counterattacks of its own, but this time around the right-wing nationalist government of Narendra Modi announced that the Indian military had crossed the border and killed more than 30 militants. It was the first time that India publically acknowledged a cross-border assault.

The Indian press has whipped up a nationalist fervor that has seen sports events between the two countries cancelled and a ban on using Pakistani actors in Indian films. The Pakistani press has been no less jingoistic.

In the meantime, the situation in Kashmir has gone from bad to worse. Early in the summer Indian security forces killed Buhan Wani, a popular leader of the Kashmir independence movement. Since then the province has essentially been paralyzed, with schools closed and massive demonstrations. Thousands of residents have been arrested, close to 100 killed, and hundreds of demonstrators wounded and blinded by the widespread use of birdshot by Indian security forces.

Indian rule in Kashmir has been singularly brutal. Between 50,000 and 80,000 people have died over the past six decades, and thousands of others have been “disappeared” by security forces. While in the past the Pakistani army aided the infiltration of terrorist groups to attack the Indian army, this time around the uprising is homegrown. Kashmiris are simply tired of military rule and a law which gives Indian security forces essentially carte blanc to terrorize the population.

Called the Special Powers Act—originally created in 1925 for the supression of Catholics in Northern Ireland, and widely used by the Israelis in the Occupied Territories—the law allows Indian authorities to arrest and imprison people without charge and gives immunity to Indian security forces.

As complex as the situation in Kashmir is, there are avenues to resolve it. A good start would be to suspend the Special Powers Act and send the Indian Army back to the barracks.

The crisis in Kashmir began when the Hindu ruler of the mostly Muslim region opted to join India when the countries were divided in 1947. At the time, the residents were promised that a UN-sponsored referendum would allow residents to choose India, Pakistan or independence. That referendum has never been held.

Certainly the current situation cannot continue. Kashmir has almost 12 million people and no army or security force—even one as large as India’s—can maintain a permanent occupation if the residents don’t want it. Instead of resorting to force, India should ratchet down its security forces and negotiate with Kashmiris for an interim increase in local autonomy.

But in the long run, the Kashmiris should have their referendum and India and Pakistan will have to accept the results.

What the world cannot afford is for the current tensions to spiral down into a military confrontation that could easily get out of hand. The U.S., through its aid to Pakistan—$860 million this year—has some leverage, but it cannot play a role if its ultimate goal is an alliance to contain China, a close ally of Pakistan.

Neither country would survive a nuclear war, and neither country should be spending its money on an arms race. Almost 30 percent of India’s population is below the poverty line, as are 22 percent of Pakistan’s. The $51 billion Indian defense budget and the $7 billion Pakistan spends could be put to far better use.

]]>Andrew Smolskihttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889452016-12-08T17:04:46Z2016-12-09T08:57:45ZMore]]>The most ludicrous argument I’ve heard as of late is that African-Americans should be neutral when it comes to Trump’s deportation policies, because African-Americans have been excluded from low-wage jobs by Latin American immigrants. While yes, it is true that employers purposively segment their labor forces to exclude African-Americans while employing migrants from Latin America, there is no evidence to believe this nativist approach to politics would benefit African-Americans. Even worse, it is a call to benefit off of misery and abuse, which seems as immoral as the call for the deportations themselves.

As I tried to explain to Yvette Carnell who was espousing such crude strategy, supporting nativist policies would benefit the growing push by white supremacist sectors of the population for de jure re-segregation, as well as reinforce the break down in working class solidarity which ultimately benefits the capitalist class.

As Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz pointed out in “Inequality in the Post-Racial Era: Race, Immigration, and Criminalization of Low-Wage Labor” and Tanya Golash-Boza in “The Parallels Between Mass Incarceration and Mass Deportation: An Intersectional Analysis of State Repression”, criminalization and deportation are co-occurring policies built into a larger restructuring of the global labor force based on racist arguments adapted for the contemporary era. One of the main policies involved in bringing about this co-occurrence is the drug war, which has affected horrifically both African-American and Latin American communities. It is a push factor for migrants, as well as a criminalization factor leading to African-Americans being 8 times more likely to be arrested and Latinxs being 3 times more likely to arrested.

And, these policies are being implemented in order to make the low wage workforce even more pliant. It is about labor control. As Gomberg-Muñoz relays, while Latinos may have access to more jobs, they are for falling wages. It is reducing labor cost through work intensification of a vulnerable population. Laura López-Sanders ethnographic work “Embedded and External Brokers: The Distinct Roles of Intermediaries in Workplace Inequality” demonstrated clearly how managers were picking Latino workers based specifically on this idea of increased work, while Bridget Anderson shows in “Migration, immigration controls, and the fashioning of precarious workers” how resistance is less likely due to deportability.

It is because of these racist and capitalist processes that the argument being put forward makes no sense, unless you actually want to reinforce a white supremacist, capitalist order. The argument is only viable “ceteris paribus” (all things being equal), an argument under conditions where we just treat labor as supply-demand, absent the reasons why and the logic of how. When I pushed Carnell to actually state the conditions under which her data were true, I was met with the retort “it is just the data”, as if data speaks for itself. Thus, crude empiricism became a substitute for quality analysis.

So, if you hear someone arguing against pluri-racial solidarity of the international working class, you are listening to them call for a retreat. The struggle they call for will not be useful in the days to come. It is unproductive, and borderline reactionary. Rather, you would do well to heed Golash-Boza’s call for intersectionality in understanding the development of the carceral state, and Immanuel Ness’ call in “Forging a Migration Policy for Capital: Labor Shortages and Guest Workers”, where he says we need a transnational workers movement that recognizes how capital increasingly relies on guest worker programs, migration, and its own movement to maintain a pliant labor force able to be exploited more and more. White capitalists ain’t giving anybody shit, and if you think supporting them will benefit you, you are naïve at best.

***

Adam Smith, who seems to me a decent chap, is much maligned; and, not by his detractors, but by his supporters. Often, the author of The Wealth of Nations is treated as an amoral asshole whose philosophy amounts to letting anyone who is making money, make as much as they possibly can. Not only is this not true, it is bandied about because it justifies the obscene economic control the rich have over the poor. Smith, who also authored The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was not the kind of shallow shit brick as to put forward grotesque non-sense like advocating greed and avarice as socially beneficial.

Instead, as can be read in chapter eight of book one, Smith knew perfectly well that the owners would use their wealth against the workers. Exhibit A is:

“Masters too sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people.”

Before this Smith says in our Exhibit B, “The [capitalists are disposed to combine] in order to lower the wages of labour.” That is, and has been recognized for well over two centuries, and said so well by Immanuel Ness, “like the water level… capital permanently settles at the lowest point, in search of the lowest-cost labor in every industry.” This is quite similar to that other much maligned economist, Karl Marx, who pointed out in “Wage Labor & Capital” that wages and profit are always in inverted proportion, and that capitalists will always work to keep wages at subsistence level (i.e. just enough so you could eat).

So, while yes, Smith does argue that increased economic growth based on more liberal trade will lead to increased wages, this is not a given, nor is it due to any benevolence on the part of the capitalists. Nor is he assuming equality of parties in this endeavor. Rather, and a crucial difference, Smith was assuming humans making economically rational decisions could arrive at a more socially beneficial order. Whatever the flaws in his theory, of which there are many, those who hold aloft his “invisible hand” in a cynical a-morality play should be thoroughly admonished for such crude misrepresentations.

]]>Joshua Sperberhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889462016-12-08T17:10:23Z2016-12-09T08:57:02ZMore]]>When I think of the liberal response to the election of Donald Trump I’m reminded of, as much as anything else, accounts of the shock and trauma that Germans experienced at the end of the First World War. Ordinary Germans were so inundated with years of wartime propaganda asserting that Germany had been winning the war that the belated realization that it had in fact lost – and would, moreover, be held entirely responsible for the war – shocked and disoriented Germans and helped lead to the notorious “Knife in the Back” conspiracy that held that the German military was defeated not on the battlefield but by treacherous domestic forces. While nobody is blaming the Jews for Hillary Clinton’s loss, bewildered liberals have nonetheless lashed out against leftists, Russians, the FBI, and, most recently, political correctness or identity politics itself.

Notably, liberals who are now advocating eschewing identity politics are doing so for the very same reason that they originally adopted them: to advance the interests of the Democratic Party. Accordingly, the liberal critique, recently articulated by Mark Lilla, is a flailing and self-incriminating exercise that more than anything else betrays the national and racial chauvinisms of liberal ideology, chauvinisms that have periodically laid dormant, until now, for the sake of political expediency. As Katherine Franke notes, “Lilla’s op-ed makes an argument for the commonalities between Americans, arguing that we have to move on to a ‘post-identity liberalism,’ refocusing our attention away from identities to broader, more abstract ideas of ‘citizenship.’”

Such an effort to manufacture a “post-identity liberalism” within the parameters of the contemporary capitalist nation-state of course will not – and cannot – transcend identity politics and will on the contrary only reproduce them in more pernicious forms; obliterating recognition of the social and economic disparities that are continually reproduced by the capitalist state, such “post-identity liberalism” can only default onto the white, male, “American” norm that is historically defined via the subordination of everyone else.

Significantly, Lilla’s prescription for national unification is precisely what Trump has promised to do: to “Make America One Again” (or, as Newt Gingrich has declared, “I am for the 100 percent”), begging the question of what such oneness consists of and what – and who – must be erased or forced to conform in order to achieve it (it’s notable that other hierarchical and violent institutions, such as corporations, also profess their undoubtedly sincere desires to create unified communities, binding bosses and workers into a “common good” that mystifies the fact that the aggrandizement of the former occurs primarily through the exploitation of the latter).

While the Lillian critique of political correctness is, as Franke notes, nationalistic and white supremacist, the counterargument – in which “talking about identity, or better yet status-based power, does not preclude discussions of class, war, the economy or the common good” – nonetheless minimizes the historic origins of identity politics and their unique suitability to pluralistic class society. In the hands of the Democratic Party identity politics have become a valuable tool precisely because of the systemic material restrictions on economic policies that, since the 1970s, have replaced postwar Keynesianism with a growing consensus geared toward regenerating growth via the accelerated impoverishment of workers.

Notably, this economic transformation has been a bipartisan and international affair, indicating that “neoliberalism” is hardly a matter of culture, ideology, or misguided political strategy, and that it cannot be simply willed away by the “good” politicians. It was due to the evolving demands of global capitalism, not caprice, thatsocialists such as Francois Mitterrand announced that “‘The French are starting to understand that it is business that creates wealth, determines our standard of living and establishes our place in the global rankings”’; Labor Prime Minister James Callaghan “glumly explained to his colleagues, ‘We used to think that you could just spend your way out of a recession…I tell you, in all candour, that that option no longer exists’”; and Bill Clinton declared, “the era of big government is over.” Those melancholically fixated on the lost possibilities of a Bernie Sanders presidency need only look at the recent election of Syriza – in which an explicitly anti-austerity party became the latest enforcers of austerity – to see the limits of economic reformism within the current stage of capitalism.

Needing something, anything, to offer voters in an era shaped by a glutted global economy in which “practical” solutions entail privatization, deregulation, and reduced taxation, the Democratic Party institutionalized identity politics. Converting the liberatory and universal potential of the radical politics of Black liberation and feminism into an electoral strategy, the Democrats instrumentalized identity politics, propagating a liberal criticism of racism in which the problem is not that racism provides an intellectually bankrupt explanation of social reality but that it is offensive. Democrats perforce relied on this subjective, rather than on an objective, critique of racism, since an acknowledgement of the utter fallaciousness of racism would bring into question not merely the identity of the system’s losers but the very fact that the system requires losers in the first place.

The seed of the anti-pc backlash sown within it, it was only a matter of time until so-called white nationalists appropriated the language of identity for themselves. Seeing that they too can be losers, white nationalists mistake themselves for one among many Others (rather than the antithesis of all Others), concluding that they are struggling because of race rather than in spite of it. Their simultaneous identification with the state leads them to internalize its pluralistic façade, as they obsess over the critics of the racist and sexist effects of an alienating and exploitative system rather than over that system itself.

The climax of the Democrats’ encounter with identity politics occurred with the 2008 election. Confronting an angry electorate disgusted with George W. Bush and open to alternative political solutions amid an imploding economy, the Democrats provided voters with the unprecedented electoral choice of an African-American man or a white woman who were nonetheless both committed centrists, ensuring that his race and her gender would not intrude upon the demands of capital. Indeed, any discussion of Obama’s legacy ought to begin by noting that Obama, equipped with a mandate for change following eight years of George W. Bush’s expansion of the executive office, consolidated and further augmented presidential power by enhancing surveillance, persecuting whistle blowers, composing kill lists, increasing drone warfare, and otherwise ensuring that Bush’s state of emergency would be made permanent.

Another significant aspect of 2008 was not only that the first African-American president had been elected but that some white conservatives, including racists, voted for him. David Roediger and Kathryn Robinson have recently shown that historically racist white towns in Wisconsin – so-called “Sundown Towns” – in fact voted far more heavily for Obama in 2008 than for Clinton in 2016. This and other evidence suggest that most white voters are not fixedly opposed to identity politics per se – and are willing to accept them if they are perceived to be aligned with a promise of greater “change” – but turn against them once they see that they are ultimately attached to an overall strategy of governance that does nothing to meaningfully reduce their suffering and, on the contrary, often exacerbates it. Precarious and visible, identity politics become the fall guy, tainted as “elite” not because of their content as such but because of a cynical Democratic messenger that is transparently committed to pursuing power for its own sake. That is, the racist, sexist, homophobic backlash against identity politics is the price that the Democratic Party is willing to pay for its refusal to either meaningfully challenge the predations of capitalism or resign from politics.

To be sure, there are constraints on Trump too. His rhetoric on trade and China is the expression of the naïve economic nationalism of someone who has only encountered the demands of the global economy from the perspective of a myopic businessman rather than a state. Amid the enduring decline in global growth, it is unlikely that Trump will pursue an unwinnable trade war with China notwithstanding Mike Pence’s new understanding that “The free market has been sorting it out, and America’s been losing.” It is similarly unlikely that Trump will seek to deport 11 million migrant workers. What he will almost certainly do, and what is wholly consistent with both the racist zeitgeist and the material needs of the state, is to further empower what Nicholas De Genova has described as the US “deportation regime,” intensifying the political and social precarity, and thereby exploitability, of undocumented workers not by deporting them all but by ensuring that they all exist in a heightened state of “deportability.”

Whereas undocumented migrants and Muslims are on the frontlines of Trump’s threatened attacks, Trump’s recent suggestion of stripping flag-burners of their citizenship reveals the growing vulnerability of everyone. Seeking to reduce critics to the legal status of enemy combatants, Trump resembles Putin only insofar as they both exemplify an executive whose power and aggressiveness are proportionate to the demands of the unending crisis in global capitalism. Representing the logic of not only US history but also the contemporary global system, Trump promises a furious assault on labor nevertheless delivered, first and foremost, in racialized form.

It is then not only that liberals have failed to meaningfully ameliorate the intensifying misery of a capitalist global system in crisis; they have actively provided authoritarians like Trump with the material capabilities and ideological justifications to increase that misery.

]]>Brandy Bakerhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889712016-12-09T17:20:53Z2016-12-09T08:56:54ZMore]]>In my previous CounterPunch piece, I attribute some of Jill Stein’s faulty decisions to her advisors from NGO backgrounds. I pointed out how those NGO guns usually bring in a top-down view of organizing. An accurate, but incomplete picture. Credible Green Party members who were directly involved in the campaign have shared with me that Stein was not being passively led around by her top team. For better or for worse, Stein was very much directly involved in every major strategic decisions made by the campaign.

Also, more than a few people close to the Stein campaign have also told me that she likes quick solution schemes, always in search for the political magic wand that would propel her campaign off into a whole new level of support and success. If your intentions transcend merely gaining exposure and votes for your campaign, then you must use your campaign to help build your political party with the people you claim to represent leading the charge. When your candidacy represents a party that needs growth more than anything else, then the only magic wand is to support your organizing base as your primary objective. Stein did not do this during her Presidential run, and is still not doing this. Also, such quick schemes that were employed were allegedly never well thought out, and as a result, they were at times poorly implemented with lackluster results.

These accounts reinforce the narrative of Stein’s campaign being a replication of a typical top-down NGO organizing model that disinvests from ground-up organizing and people-powered structures. It is a model that replaces bottom-up democracy with the idea of political change occurring through the influence and power of the liberal-left leaning bourgeoisie elite and its access to wealth. This very vision, this very approach has hurt the Green Party’s capacity to grow into the truly revolutionary peoples’ party that it needs to be. It also goes a long way in explaining Stein’s flirtations with the Democrats and this recount stunt.

Those flirtations with Democrats not only comprised of the endorsement of Bernie Sanders and her invitation to have him on the Green Presidential ticket with her, it was also reflected in the hiring of some of her campaign staff. While the campaign had some great field organizers from the Green Party, there were those very closely tied to the Democratic Party, including the Stein/Baraka 2016 Southeast Regional Field Coordinator Lawrence Moore from South Carolina. Moore has run for state office a few times, including this year, as a Democrat. There were other Democrats who were hired in the South to work the Stein campaign who had access to the campaign databases and lists. These workers, as strong as they may have been in some respects, were not looking out for the Party in the way that a Green or any other anti-duopoly activist would. It would be one matter if these were merely people new to third party political organizing, or were on their way out of the Dems and they did not yet have their state elections boards scrub the D off of their cards, or even merely ambivalent about the Democratic Party, but there were people like Moore who were strongly attached to the Democratic Party as well as those who were very involved in “progressive” Democratic Party organizations while they were working the Stein campaign.

The South Carolina Green Party likely did not mind having Democrats as Stein employees as SCGP regularly violates Green Party independence by allowing those who are running for office as Democrats to run as Greens as well. South Carolina is one of the few “fusion” states left in the country where candidates for office can run on multiple ballot lines. New York is also a “fusion” state, but the New York State Green Party years ago banned their candidates from fusing with Democrats and Republicans as the NYSGP members are now and have always been some of the fierciest fighters for Green Party independence in the nation.

There were also Bernie Sanders supporters who volunteered for the Stein campaign answering volunteer sign-ups this past summer who changed the automated replies to pro-Bernie messages. These modifications, which were quickly discovered and corrected, are certainly not the fault of the Stein/Baraka campaign or anyone working on the campaign, but realities like this do underscore that there was a great need to make sure that the Stein campaign kept itself independent from the two party system, most especially the Democrats as new people were coming to us from the deflated Bernie movement.

I cite all of this not to condemn Stein, but to help us understand some of the dynamics of the Stein campaign. All leaders have deficiencies, all campaigns make mistakes. Even any POTUS campaigns that would seek to reject the top-down NGO model and truly be people-powered would also have great shortcomings.

The Green Party is a bottom-up party, at least it is supposed to be. However, it would obviously be unfair and unrealistic to expect Stein to run a horizontal Presidential campaign with input on every decision from the Party. Now on decisions such as: endorsing Bernie Sanders for the California primary; inviting Sanders onto the Presidential ticket even though Stein had absolutely no authorization to do so; and launching a recount at the urging of elite Democratic Party partisans who care nothing about the Green Party or its future, these are all Stein’s choices that will affect the Greens for a long time after the Stein campaign is no more. That is why such decisions must be made with the input of the Green Party itself. Regardless of any principled criticisms one may have about the Green Party’s structure, the Green Party of the United States Steering Committee is our current leadership.

The Stein Campaign Approaches the Steering Committee

It has been widely reported that John Bonifaz, a Boston attorney and elections activist approached Jill Stein and asked her to initiate the recount in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, three states where Hillary Clinton barely lost. Bonifaz reached out to Stein after the plan for this three state recount was rebuffed by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

In my previous article in CounterPunch, I reported that Jill Stein and her manager David Cobb had reached out to the Green Party of the United States Steering Committee with virtually no notice to have a 10PM conference call with the Steering Committee to lobby them to sign onto the recount. I also reported that Stein wanted GPUS to open a bank account just for receiving donations since GPUS could take up to $10,000.

It turns out that I under-reported this amount. The amount that GPUS could take was up to $100,000, which Stein and Cobb knew, which GPUS Steering Committee member Chris Blankenhorn has confirmed. Stein and Cobb wanted this to quickly occur as they had donors who were ready to immediately donate large sums to fund a recount effort. Stein and Cobb did not give the names of these potential donors to the Steering Committee. Stein and Cobb stated that they did not know who these donors were, but that the election integrity activists who approached the Stein campaign did know.

It is important to understand that the Steering Committee consists of seven co-chairs, a secretary, and a treasurer. All are unpaid positions. The SC members volunteer commitments are even greater than that of a full-time job: they keep the Green Party running. As stated above, they took the call at 10 PM at the request of Stein and Cobb with very little notice.

If the SC had voted to take on this recount, it would have meant that the GPUS would be a fiduciary shell to funnel money from wealthy Democrats to fund a recount plan that was originally birthed by Democrats. Some Steering Committee members soon realized that they could not offer input into the three states’ plan or modify it in any way as the recipe was cooked up by the Democrat activists, and the plan was delivered ready-baked to the Stein camp. If the SC would have voted to take on this recount, the project could conceivably have opened up the SC members to a great level of personal liability. Not only would any unsavory donations or donors tarnish the Green Party, it could have conceivably open up these volunteers to enormous legal and financial risks.

At least half of the SC is working class; one member is meeting ends working at a fast food joint. The heavy lobbying of the SC by Stein, Cobb, and Ben Manski to get the SC to sign on to satify the wishes of rich, Democratic Party-supporting donors reeks of a level of classism that comes from the NGO mindset of organizing.

Poorly thought out quick schemes indeed.

Immediately after the SC voted to not be the fiduciary shell for the recount, the Stein campaign itself launched the fundraising drive for the recount. One could donate to the up to $2700 to the Stein campaign and up to $10,000 each to the state Green Parties of Ohio and Massachusetts. Currently, the campaign is accepting donations of up to $2700 and there is no longer any mention of Ohio and Massachusetts accepting donations for this recount. Now, they go to great lengths to let everyone know that they are being funded by “small donations.”

Russian Hackers

Is there is any explanation for Jill Stein to latch onto the jingoistic, Cold War rhetoric of Russian hacking conspiracies that come straight from the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and the White House? Not even poorly thought out schemes explain this one. When Stein first announced that she was launching the recount, she also had this type of rhetoric in the following statement that has since been sanitized on her site, but not before it was was picked up in various outlets such as The Telegraph and CNBC:

“After a divisive and painful presidential race, in which foreign agents hacked into party databases, private email servers, and voter databases in certain states, many Americans are wondering if our election results are reliable. That’s why the unexpected results of the election and reported anomalies need to be investigated before the 2016 presidential election is certified. We deserve elections we can trust.”

The Wisconsin petition and an early draft of the Michigan recount petition promote the same kind of rhetoric. Anyone looking at a copy of the Wisconsin petition can see this:

Page one, point number 3:

“The petitioner is informed and believes that:

a. In August 2016, it was widely reported that foreign operators breached voter registration databases in at least two states and stole hundreds of thousands of voter records.”

Page two, point f:

“f. The well-documented and conclusive evidence of foreign interference in the presidential race before the election, along with irregularities observed in Wisconsin, call into question the results and indicate the possibility that widespread breach occurred.”

The argument cannot be made that Jill Stein is unaware that this anti-Russian propaganda is in her petition and the earlier draft of the Michigan petition. Her notarized signature appears right under her main “The Russians did it” points.

In a detailed account written by Michigan Green Party activist LuAnn Kozma that has been publicly posted, Kozma points out that the Stein camp hired Democratic Party operatives to run the recount in her state, bypassing leftist legal outfits such as the local National Lawyers Guild and those who worked on state’s marijuana legalization campaign. She also points out that the Stein/Baraka electors were being successfully lobbied to sign onto the campaign’s Michigan legal brief:

“[W]hy is Stein’s Democratic Party-led legal team asking and pressuring our 16 electors –telling them they could even talk to Jill if they were uncertain about signing along on the petition with her?” Kozma asks. “In Michigan [Stein] recruited some of our 16 electors to sign along with her, and agree to those preposterous statements. Amazingly, many did.”

It is also important to note that Kozma is a paralegal and her spouse is an attorney. Both are members of the local National Lawyers’ Guild. They certainly would have known where to point the Stein campaign as far as hiring a legal team. Also, while the final copy of the Michigan recount petition submitted did not have the Russian hacking conspiracy theories, an earlier copy certainly did. This earlier copy is the one that Kozma refers to in her letter posted on-line.

“Why couldn’t she have just done one state?” Kozma asked me in a recent phone interview. “Why did she have to do the three where Hillary barely lost?”

Greg Palast recently chimed in on the blame the Russians theory and attempted to absolve the Stein campaign of promoting any of this nonsense. In the final paragraph of his article, Palast rightfully excortiates computer science professor J. Alex Halderman for doing so: “Professor Halderman, if you want to help the recount, put down the James Bond novels and pick up some Opti-Scan ballots.”

Either Palast did not bother to pick up the Stein Wisconsin recount petition or he is ignoring its contents. The Stein camp’s main expert in the the “Russians did it” argument is none other than, guess who? J. Alex Halderman himself. His testimony and credentials take up a chunk of Stein’s Wisconsin recount petition.

While doing our best to point out how racist and disenfranchising our election system has always been and working with anyone who is willing to work with us on election issues, we need to understand that Palast, like the rest of the election integrity movement, is foundation funded. They bat for the Democrats. In any alliance that we Greens and other anti-duopoly activists form with these folks, we need to discern any and all attempts to try to co-opt us and to water down our message. That wasn’t done with this recount, unfortunately. Not only do we have our 2016 Green Party candidate raising money and hiring Democratic Party operatives to recount three states that Hillary Clinton barely lost, we have our candidate parroting Hillary’s discredited anti-Russia talking points.

New York State delegate Dani Liebling chimed in on the Green National Committee listserv:

“ ‘I have talked to Jill and she is aware that some on this list are expressing a concern about the appearance of ‘red-baiting’ in the petitions and/or about working too closely with the Democrats. She assured me that neither are the case. She explained clearly that when attempting to get the states to allow the recounts, arguments had to be referred to that state officials would see as legitimate (such as Clinton’s claim’s of Russian hacking). If state officials were not convinced of valid reasons for going forward, there was risk of recount petitions being rejected.’”

It is unfortunate to see this type of equivocating from Stein. Appearances matter in politics even more so than intent, and because of this reality, the Stein recount effort is about helping the Democrats no matter what the initial intent may have been. When working with Democratic Party players, it is easy to get in over one’s heads if one is not careful, and the line of independence gets crossed.

“It is also important to note that Kozma is a paralegal and her spouse is an attorney. Both are members of the local National Lawyers’ Guild. They certainly would have known where to point the Stein campaign as far as hiring a legal team. Also, while the final copy of the Michigan recount petition submitted did not have the Russian hacking conspiracy theories, an earlier copy certainly did. This earlier copy is the one that Kozma refers to in her letter. As we go to press, we know that the Russian hacking conspiracy theory were part of the Stein camp’s arguments in Michigan. The judge who threw out the case cites it: “Not even Gremlins, Martians, or Russian hackers.” So while they may not have been in the final petition, they were certainly presented in court”

After the Recount

There’s talk about Stein’s campaign manager David Cobb starting campaign schools in 2017. This discussion that has been going on internally for some time, but now it has recently hit the press. There has also been talk of Cobb and others angling to use the recount as a springboard to organize political entities outside of the Green Party. Whether or not the campaign schools are a part of this plan remains unclear.

The Stein campaign is allegedly doing an election conference in February. That’s wonderful. She is and would continue to be a great spokesperson, but she should do it in alliance with or representing the Green Party of the United States. Wouldn’t it be proper at this point to wrap up the recount, pay off the campaign debt, and shut her campaign down as soon as possible while turning every resource allowable by law over the the Green Party of the United States? Stein will of course be an asset to the Green Party in the years to come, and hopefully will be very supportive of our 2020 Presidential candidate.

The Future of the Green Party

The recount has become a huge distraction for the Greens, and one from which we should move forward. While many individual Greens here in Maryland signed the petition opposing the recount, our state party took a neutral position on it and is focusing on local organizing. A wise decision. Baltimore City has grown tremendously this election cycle thanks partly to the Stein/Baraka campaign, but largely to some strong local campaigns and good organizing. It is one of the most vibrant and energetic Green Party locals in the country. A new local has formed in Baltimore County and they have put full independence from the two party system in the by-laws. The New Jersey State Green Party and its locals are doing some impressive organizing as is the Alabama Green Party. Colorado passed some of the strongest bylaws on independence when their liberal wing was trying to pressure them to endorse Bernie Sanders during the Democratic Party primary. The fight for independence in the Green Party remains strong not only locally, but nationally, and the recount battle is yet another example of this reality.

More locals are embracing the membership-based, dues paying model, so there is hope of us eventually stamping out the NGO model of organizing in the Green Party, or at least greatly diluting it. There really are few other nationwide organizations on the left that seeks to empower people in their communities, to be open to others bringing their own struggles into the organization instead of the other way around. We need to forget about the 5% when we run in the Presidential elections and strengthen the local bases first. When the country is ready, they’ll give the Greens their 5%.

The Greens were never supposed to be about top-down schemes: “Safe states”, voter trading, endorsing “progressive” democrats, or partisan recounts.

The Green Party is Jason Justice of Colorado during roll call at the convention wrapped in the Colorado Pride flag naming victims of police shootings. It is Baltimore anti-poverty activist, the Reverend Annie Chambers and recently declaring, “I want to talk about the poor.” It is Baltimore’s Vince Tola who has spent years of his life and who has made personal sacrifices to keep Baltimore Green Party organizing efforts afloat. It’s door knocking, events, meetings, phone calls, emails, Greens all over the nation trying locally to bring people together to make their communities and this country a decent place to live. So what about solid, old-fashioned, bare bones organizing? Not just focusing on electoral politics. Perhaps that should be second or third down the list of our main activities. Organizers talking to people at their jobs, as they come out of night school, as they are sitting on their stoops. It’s not going to happen through social media. As Tony Soprano said, “this is a face to face business.” The Trump years will be tough and the liberal astro-turf organizations disguising themselves as resistance will not provide any solutions. It will be organizations that seek to hold both parties accountable, that see how deeply the systemic rot runs, and that work to bring revolutionary change that will matter. The Greens should strive to be one of those organizations.

Some see old-school organizing as dated and unfashionable.

If that is the case, then let us be unfashionable.

]]>Katheryne Schulzhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889542016-12-08T18:03:15Z2016-12-09T08:56:46ZMore]]>We must have been feeling a bit crazy on Tuesday [November 29] when we decided to fly from British Columbia to Cuba two days later to attend Fidel Castro’s funeral. My mother, Pat Schulz, was active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in the 1960s that sent delegations of working class Canadians down to Cuba after the revolution. These folks came back and met with Canadians in cities and towns across the country to explain how the Cuban dictator Batista had turned Cuba into a brothel and casino for rich Americans and mafiosos, and how the Cuban revolutionaries led by Fidel and Che Guevara had overthrown Batista and were working to implement a socialist revolution.

My mother went to Cuba during the fifth anniversary of the Revolution and remembered it always as one of the highlights of her life. Their biggest success was in persuading Prime Minister Diefenbaker that Canada should not participate in the U.S. embargo against Cuba. As a result, Canada continued to trade with Cuba and thousands of Canadians have spent time in Cuba, establishing friendships and family relationships there over the years.
Naturally, before I left I contacted those friends of my mother who were active in the Fair Play committee and are still around, many of them in their 70s and 80s. They shared some of their stories with me. Reggie talked about the time she wrote an essay on why history would absolve Fidel Castro and won a trip to Havana courtesy of the revolutionary government. Reggie found herself on January 1 of 1965 or 1966 sitting in the Plaza de la Revolution with thousands of Cubans eating a New Years dinner organized by revolutionary Celia Sanchez and every Cuban cook in town. Reggie remembers some of the guys on the Cuban revolutionary junta playing a trick on Celia, telling her the night before that the dinner was cancelled. They printed up a limited edition of Granma to lend authenticity to the joke.

Harry remembers activists from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) being persecuted by the FBI in the 1960s and that some Canadian comrades hid these activists in their homes, enabling them to make it safety in Havana. It was no surprise to these folks that my partner Janet and I, and our friend Kathy Le, decided it was important to make the journey to say goodbye to Fidel on behalf of everyone we know who has worked in solidarity with Cuba.

When we landed in Holguin on Friday, we were met by our Cuban friends Delvis and Dugnae, who planned to drive us to Santiago in about two hours. That plan quickly fell apart. The procession carrying Fidel’s ashes had left Havana on Tuesday and so we arrived in Holguin on the same day as Fidel’s entourage. As we drove along the road to Santiago, we passed mile after mile of Fidel supporters, school children, small farmers, and townspeople carrying photographs of Fidel and waiting patiently for their chance to say goodbye. School children were chanting ‘Yo Soy Fidel!’ (I am Fidel!). This chant carries a double meaning of being both a part of Fidel himself and being loyal to the Revolution.

We made it to Mirian, a small rural town outside Bayamo before we were asked to pull over for security reasons. So we joined the people of Mirian and the campesinos who had come on their carts from their rural farms in keeping vigil by the side of the road, waiting for Fidel. The townspeople young and old, plainly dressed, many holding umbrellas to ward off the sun, stood together in small groups talking to one another and visiting with their neighbours.

Finally, the sun set and then the funeral entourage drove into Mirian. People chanted ‘Yo Soy Fidel!’ spontaneously as the coffin passed, and many began to weep. For these Cubans, seeing that small coffin finally brought home the reality that their Fidel was dead.

We thanked the people nearby for sharing this moment with us, and we were kissed and thanked for being present. We got back into our car, headed for Santiago. Delvis and I held hands in the back seat as we hurtled through the night, passing thousands of Cubans heading home after hours of maintaining their vigil.

The next morning at Delvis’ place, having put our banner together which read ‘Hasta Siempre Fidel! With love from your comrades on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee’, we headed out to the Plaza Marti to see the procession arrive from Bayamo to Santiago. On the way to the plaza, Santiago was strangely quiet and we realized that there was no reggaeton music playing. All of Santiago was in mourning. We passed house after house hung with revolutionary signs and banners mourning the loss of Fidel, and every Santaguerro we saw was wearing their revolutionary arm band or their handmade t-shirt that read Yo Soy Fidel and carrying their Cuban flags.

At the plaza, we unfurled our small banner and answered curious questions from bystanders about who we were and what it meant. Cubans expressed their sorrow to us over Fidel’s death and their appreciation that we cared enough to come for the funeral. As Fidel’s coffin passed by the thousands of school children, workers and Santaguerros lining the roads, they chanted and sang the Cuban national anthem.

This afternoon, December 3, we made our way to the Plaza de La Revolution and I am sitting here now writing this, four hours before Raul Castro is scheduled to speak, amidst the hundreds of thousands gathered to pay tribute to Fidel. We are surrounded by Cubans – thousands and thousands of youth and young internationalists from Spain, Germany, the U.S., Chile and everywhere else you can think of.

Dignitaries have come from across Latin America and Africa to pay their respects. Of course, the rich in Miami and the United States are spinning, doing their best to re-frame Castro’s legacy. But as it turns out, poor people both inside Cuba and outside have decided for themselves that Fidel was their champion. Here in the Plaza, Cuban workers are standing up in the crowd spontaneously and speaking eloquently about all of the ways Fidel worked with them to achieve dignity and independence. The veterans of Cuba’s war in Angola—those who fought the apartheid military and helped Mandela achieve his victory–are present with their medals of honour. There are rolling chants of Se oye, se siente, Fidel esta presente (We hear him, we feel him, Fidel is with us) and Fidel amigo, el pueblo esta contigo. It is beautiful. Unforgettable. Like Cuba. Like Fidel.

Postscript: Thousands of Cubans maintained an overnight vigil for Fidel on Saturday, singing and reading poetry in his memory. Sunday morning at 7 a.m., he was brought to the Santiago cemetery and laid to rest beside his hero Jose Marti. Hasta siempre, comandante.

]]>Nelson Valdeshttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889312016-12-08T01:19:18Z2016-12-09T08:56:23ZMore]]>We are born, we grow up, and we live. This happens within a given historical context. We are products of the social, economic, political, cultural-emotional environments. We are also our history; but most people are not even aware of their surroundings and the conditions that influence and affect them. Fidel Castro was shaped by all these circumstances; and he seemed to be very much aware of his context and place. This is not, at all, surprising – his Jesuit education played a very important formative influence in his primary and secondary education. Moreover, he was a student who had to live at the school’s facilities because in the town of Biran, where he was born, there were no schools that could meet the children and teenagers’ needs. Fidel went to the best private and Jesuit schools in the country (Colegio Dolores in Santiago de Cuba and Belen in Havana). In fact, most of the political and economic leaders of Cuba in the first half of the 20th century attended those two schools.

As a child, Fidel had the singularity of being physically athletic, intelligent and with a strong determination. He was a thinking child who did not show signs of fear. He was also –usually– taller than the rest of the boys of his age. His memory and daring also stood out.

From a young age, Fidel was a good student with a prodigious memory. He like to read about history, literature, and geography, among other subjects. He also had the gift of remembering the names of people as well as facts. He paid attention to details and from his Jesuit teachers learned to be analytical. He was not known to be a dancer –something so Cuban– but he made up for that by being a baseball and basketball player, an explorer and a swimmer. He loved the outdoors, walking and hiking. He was born with the gift of wanting to learn everything and of being able to express his ideas, and to draw conclusions on the basis of what he observed–and also take action. He had a sense of himself, his environment, the moment and its possibilities. That he learned at school. He liked sports, books, adventure, exploring nature but also learning philosophy, letters, the law, history, sciences and, of course, politics. This was also part of his schooling. He was a militant in the Ortodoxo Youth and became an influential voice in the Cuban People’s Party (Ortodoxo) – which had the motto of “dignity against money” [verguenza contra dinero]. In fact, by an odd coincidence, Fidel followed the same educational path as Eduardo Chibás, who also went to the Dolores school in Santiago as well as Belen in Havana and the University of Havana. Many of Fidel’s teachers had been Chibás’ instructors as well. It is from Chibás that Fidel learned the style of public speaking that made both famous. But Chibás lacked the athletic side. Strangely, Fidel was born on August 13, 1926, while Chibás was 19 years older (born on August 15, 1907).

Money did not attract Fidel’s attention. And from a young age he had the gift of the spoken word. Like many young people, he read José Martí and that influence followed him forever (Most Cuban politicians mentioned Marti in their public speaking, including Fulgencio Batista, but Fidel became an authentic Martí disciple). In the 1940s – while in high school – when the Cuban parliament was discussing the secularization of public schools, Fidel spoke against it on behalf of his school.

As an adult, Fidel identified with social issues, student and national politics and movements. From his parents, school, political affiliation and studies he developed a clear sense of what was “just”.

He met and followed the famous charismatic politician Eduardo Chibás, and among his elders be befriended leading national figures including the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz and had close contact with people who had strategic access to Cuban populism such as Conchita Fernández [who had been a secretary of Ortiz as well as Chibás]. He studied –as many Cubans did– José Martí ‘s work –the Martí who founded a political party and revolutionary movement in the armed fight for Cuban independence. The 19th century intellectual, poet, journalist was also a teacher of tobacco workers – who united the social question (labor rights, etc) with the struggle for national emancipation. It was also the Martí that taught through his poetry the necessity of defending justice and social equality; the one of the poem Los za – paticos de Rosa [The Pink Shoes –a poem by Martí that depicts the altruistic act of a very young girl who gives her new shoes to a poor girl – which was an elegy to social justice). Moreover, Martí was the intellectual who in the late 19th century organized a political party for national liberation through the use of weapons. In Martí’s view, national independence had a twofold objective: to attain Cuba’s national sovereignty while stopping the US government from seizing the island.

Fidel wanted to learn so much and so fast that he studied on his own, without a tutor, numerous subjects at the University of Havana. He had a photographic memory. And he was active and sociable at home in his house in the country as he was at school.

As a grown man he succeeded in taking the place, after 1951, of the disappeared charismatic leader, Eduardo Chibás and articulated a view of a revolutionary Chibás movement that eventually, and for various reasons, evolved into a revolutionary Latin American Marxism.

Like the intellectual and revolutionary José Martí, Fidel adopted the strategy and vision of armed struggle to create a new Cuba. His internationalism stems from Marti as well who proclaimed that “homeland is humanity.” Fidel integrated the thoughts of Martí, Simón Bolívar and even Karl Marx.

Fidel Castro and those who worked with him were transformed by the process of producing revolutionary changes in Cuba.

And, even with Cuba’s small population, so close to the United States, and with so few material resources, Fidel and compatriots transformed the island into an alternative model in the hemisphere. And from the onset Fidel Castro transformed Cuba from a dependency dominated from the north into an example for the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and even Asia. By January 23, 1959 Fidel was already visiting Venezuela. Eventually, Cubans became active members of an international community where they are taken into account.

The Cuban revolution changed everything, not only on the island. Social and mass mobilization made people participate in programs of education, construction, culture spreading, health, and brought a sense of self-emancipation to many supposedly “dark” corners of the world.

It is with Cuba that the world learned of a new internationalism –based on solidarity, brotherhood, justice and respect for one another.

In addition, Cuba survived the terrible years of the nineteen-nineties when the foreign media and numerous governments said that the island was Numancia, or a Jurassic Park with no future. However, instead of being isolated, Cuba survived with even greater internationalism. Fidel spoke with the people almost daily and urged them to fight and carry on.

From early 1959, the Cuban people joined efforts in the construction of the Cuban and Latin American nation. Eventually, Cuba and the Third World became brothers.

It was once thought that the Cuban Revolution was not going to survive without the colonial relationship it had enjoyed with the United States. The same was also believed after Cuba was alone when the Soviet bloc disappeared. When the illness of Fidel began, it was thought that the revolutionary regime would be impossible without the charismatic leader. Now, it is possible that many will again assume that the Cuban revolution will not be able to continue. But Jose Marti had written on March 21, 1889, in his letter to Manuel Mercado, what Fidel and all Cuban revolutionaries have as their method, goal and end:

“What I want is to show that we are good, industrious and capable peoples. To each offense, a response … and more effective because of its moderation. To each false assertion about our countries, the correction at the foot of the page. To each flaw –fair in appearance– of which we are accused, the historical explanation that explains it, and the proof of the ability to remedy it. Without defending, I do not know how to live. It would seem to me that I was guilty, and that I failed to do my duty, if I could not carry out this idea. ”

— José Martí, “Letter to Manuel Mercado,” March 21, 1889

A portion of this essay was translated by Walter Lippmann.

]]>Norman Solomonhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889472016-12-09T19:15:00Z2016-12-09T08:55:53ZMore]]>On Tuesday, Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and six ranking members of major House committees sent President Obama a letter declaring, “We are deeply concerned by Russian efforts to undermine, interfere with, and even influence the outcome of our recent election.”

A prominent signer of the letter — Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee — is among the Democrats most eager to denounce Russian subversion.

A week ago, when the House approved by a 390-30 margin and sent to the Senate the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal 2017, Schiff praised “important provisions aimed at countering Russia’s destabilizing efforts — including those targeting our elections.” One of those “important provisions,” Section 501, sets up in the executive branch “an interagency committee to counter active measures by the Russian Federation to exert covert influence.”

This high-level committee could easily morph into a protracted real-life nightmare.

While lacking public accountability, the committee is mandated to ferret out such ambiguous phenomena as Russian “media manipulation” and “disinformation.” Along the way, the committee could target an array of activists, political opponents or irksome journalists. In any event, its power to fulfill “such other duties as the president may designate” would be ready-made for abuse.

The committee is to be selected by presidential appointees, including the director of the FBI — an agency with leadership that has all too often pursued covert and overt political agendas, from the times of J. Edgar Hoover to James Comey.

All in all, the provision is a gift for the next president, tied up in a bow by congressional Democrats.

This country went through protracted witch hunts during the McCarthy era. A lot of citizens — including many government workers — had their lives damaged or even destroyed. The chill on the First Amendment became frosty, then icy. Democracy was on the ropes.

Joe McCarthy rose to corrosive prominence at the midpoint of the 20th century by riding hysteria and spurring it on. The demagoguery was fueled not only by opportunistic politicians but also by media outlets all too eager to damage the First Amendment and other civil liberties in the name of Americanism and anti-communism.

Today, congressional leaders of both parties seem glad to pretend that Section 501 of the Intelligence Authorization Act is just fine, rather than an odious and dangerous threat to precious constitutional freedoms. On automatic pilot, many senators will vote aye without a second thought.

Yet by rights, with growing grassroots opposition, this terrible provision should be blocked by legislators in both parties, whether calling themselves progressives, liberals, libertarians, Tea Partyers or whatever, who don’t want to chip away at cornerstones of the Bill of Rights.

Most Democratic leaders, for their part, seem determined to implicitly — or even explicitly — scapegoat the Russian government for the presidential election results. Rather than clearly assess the impacts of Hillary Clinton’s coziness with Wall Street, or even the role of the FBI director just before the election, the Democratic line seems bent on playing an anti-Russia card.

Perhaps in the mistaken belief that they can gain some kind of competitive advantage over the GOP by charging Russian intervention for Donald Trump’s victory, the Democrats are playing with fire. The likely burn victims are the First Amendment and other precious freedoms.

When liberals have helped to launch a witch hunt, Republican politicians have been pleased to boost it into the stratosphere. That’s what happened after Harry Truman issued an executive order in March 1947 to establish “loyalty” investigations in every agency of the federal government.

Truman may have thought he was tossing GOP extremists a bone that they would stop to gnaw on. But he actually supplied them with red meat for an all-out assault on civil liberties. An ambitious new arrival in the House named Richard Nixon did his part to escalate the witch hunting. So did other Republican lawmakers, like Sens. Karl Mundt of South Dakota and Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Some Democrats, like Nevada’s Sen. Pat McCarran, were pleased to join in. The rest is disgraceful and tragic history.

Now, most lawmakers on Capitol Hill seem inclined to let it happen again. Of course the upcoming era won’t be the same as the one that bears the name of McCarthy. History doesn’t exactly repeat itself, but it can rhyme an awful lot.

]]>Renee Parsonshttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889222016-12-07T21:21:34Z2016-12-09T08:55:45ZMore]]>There is no doubt that the 2016 Presidential election may ultimately be declared the most divisive and the most problematic election in American history, indeed the beginning of an unwelcome but perhaps necessary watershed event.

As the 2016 election approached, the importance of the Electoral College was never an unknown obscurity of American politics. Everyone knew the magic number of 270 electoral votes. Certainly that fact should have been of uppermost importance in the HRC and Trump campaigns. As should be completely obvious, a campaign based on reaching that Electoral College number is a very different campaign than one conducted simply to achieve the highest total of popular votes. That is Lesson #1 in Elementary Presidential Campaign Organizing 101 but HRC never grasped that she could not manipulate the final result, whatever the outcome.

My first indication that there would be an ultra-upset with the results was a very late election evening call from an east coast Dem-Lib friend who had supported Bernie – sobbing and wailing; at times it was difficult to understand her; Initially I thought she had tragically lost a member of her family, perhaps the family dog had been hit by a car. “What is happening to our country? I can’t believe it,” she cried. She was inconsolably distraught that the nation was about to be taken over by gangs of the indescribable ‘deplorable’ type running wild through the streets; setting cars on fire, blocking traffic, burning the American flag, breaking store windows and causing general mayhem while committing acts of civil unrest and even threatening Constitutional order.

Well, she was correct; some of that happened but it was not the deplorables who took to the streets, gloating in triumph or taunting the losers with defeat. To consider the anti Trump street protests as ‘resistance’ may be more about wishful thinking since they were clearly orchestrated by Soros-sponsored groups like MoveOn.org which will continue their ‘group think’ campaign to manipulate a public response to The Donald.

Like many of us during our voting years, there has been no candidate whom we truly believed would make a Great President. Many of us have spent a decade or two of disillusionment on election night and yet our inner Snowflakes never cried, spun off into hysterics nor did most of us ever have the luxury of having a tantrum or an emotional breakdown. Disappointment yes – like when Ralph lost the 2000 election and then again in 2004. What was wrong with the country? Why would anyone vote for a Democratic party that had dismantled welfare reform, throwing single moms and their kids off their monthly pittance and do nothing to initiate a modern day Reconstruction for the inner cities? Why would anyone vote for a Democrat who was, at best, an undercover Republicrat? Why couldn’t the rest of the country see through the partisan platitudes and lies?

If the response to Trump’s election had been spontaneous and independent uprisings as acts of defiance, the opposition would be validated as authentic and powerful glimmers of a true democratic movement. Unfortunately, they are more reminiscent of the coordinated Color campaigns that have taken place around the globe with one goal in mind – regime change.

It has been stunning to observe the outpouring of easily-led, well-meaning adolescents who continue to be betrayed by Bernie, the Senate’s new Outreach Chair as well as adult Dem-Libs convinced of their own superiority that they know best for every other American and who yet believe themselves to be tolerant and respectful of differences.

To understand that the street protests were coordinated, predetermined efforts rather than spontaneous, instinctive events is one thing (authentic taking-to-the-streets response are the backbone of democracy), but then to witness the emotional, cultural breakdown of a weeping, traumatized generation with an inability to cope with reality, their immediate environment or life’s vagaries is more than worrisome. The videos of students in need of play doh, arts and craft classes, group counseling, excused absence from class, coloring books and safe spaces are indicative of a coddled generation sheltered from the ‘real’ feelings of failure and pain and with little developed sense of self-reliance. Have we created a generation raised with an expectation that they earned a soccer trophy for losing and deserve the latest cd and the newest digital toy at their fingertips.

Will this be a generation with the fortitude, the intellect and the inner core of strength to some day take the reins of government or, in the meantime, to stand up in a powerful way against the established order or will they crumple when truly confronted with the brick-wall of opposition to their egalitarian ideals.

So far, from what we have seen, protest violence, albeit a minority, has been a response which begs the question of who is committing the violence? Is there an SDS off shoot on the horizon or is there an undercurrent of something more sinister?

To those who see Trump’s election as a dire misdirection for the country and that all he represents as objectionable (and yes, many of his Cabinet appointments are objectionable but then some of us elders felt the same about Obama’s cabinet), then man the barricades and dig in with some strategic thinking; preferably not at the knee of MoveOn or other oligarch funded ‘non-profits’ which have their own agenda to control a protest movement.

A Constitutional response is that this is what Election Day is all about and that, like it or not, Donald Trump is the democratically elected President and who can forget as HRC so eloquently put it that whoever does not accept election results is a “direct threat to our democracy.” Et tu, Hillary? As a refresher, we have an Electoral College process to protect the concept of “one person, one vote;” that is a vote in Los Angeles is no more important than a vote in Wood River, Illinois and the transparent efforts to delegitimize the Trump election with specious, frivolous claims of hacking represents a self-serving, inappropriate intrusion into our Constitutional democratic process. I don’t buy Stein’s assertions for a moment.

While ‘Deport Trump’ signs have been evident throughout the protests as a major objection to a Trump Presidency, my grasp of the President-elect’s immigration policy has been sketchy, encouraged some of my own research. Check this out:

“All Americans not only in the states most heavily affected by and in every place in this country are rightly disturbed by the large number of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefit to illegal aliens. In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the work place as recommended by the commission head by former Rep Barbara Jordan. We are a nation of immigrants but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years and we must do more to stop it.”

Sounds like Trump right? Actually that was President Bill Clinton’s 1995 State of the Union Address to Congress for which he received a standing ovation. Needless to say, neither Obama who has deported two million illegals and Clinton were never accused of being racist but we now know that the Democrats have realized what a trove of potential registered Democrats the immigrant community represent.

And then there is the issue of Trump’s plan to register Muslims in a database from specific countries with a history of terrorism which has been criticized as further evidence of Trump’s racism. Trump’s proposal sounds similar to the Entry-Exit Registration System established by President GW Bush in 2001, the system later morphed into the Department of Homeland Security and was operational until 2011.

During the Iranian hostage crisis of 1980, President Jimmy Carter adopted a ban of Shiite Muslim immigrants from Iran entering into the US in an effort to ‘protect the country.” He ultimately deported 15,000 Iranian students. Carter’s ban “invalidated all visas issued to Iranian citizens for future entry into the United States.”

So if we accept that there is common ground amongst Presidents Clinton, GW Bush, Carter and President elect Trump that the impact of illegal immigration on our public school system and other social institutions is a legitimate concern for the nation, why the double standard? It is not just because Trump does not fit into the image of a sleek, urbane President; he is not a smooth, sugar coated talker like Obama while a rough-around-the-edges Trump may actually act on immigration reform.

On the campaign trail, the President-elect has been hyperbolic and straightforward, sometimes crude and discourteous and yet Trump has questioned the globalized economy and trade deals, the existence of NATO and the Fed Banks, a desire to get along with Russia and in his Cincinnati speech, establish a “new foreign policy that will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments. Our goal is stability; not chaos” and more recently in North Carolina to “reestablish the Rule of Law and defend the Constitution of the US.”

When was the last time a Democrat talked like that or are those peace-niks among us being conned? Who does that kind of language threaten?

]]>Margaret Kimberleyhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889432016-12-08T17:01:41Z2016-12-09T08:55:26ZMore]]>Black Americans were lost and politically helpless before Election Day in 2016. Having a black Democrat in the presidency hid a multitude of sins. As a group we have lost jobs, the little wealth we had, and literally our lives and freedom from the police state. Donald Trump’s election just made what was already true crystal clear.

The victory of a Republican is always cause for some degree of panic among black people. They are, after all, the white people’s party and their ascension creates anxiety among us.

Donald Trump’s appeal to white nationalism has certainly upped the ante. The people who hold onto the feckless Democrats with a vice-like death grip now believe they have nowhere to turn. The Democrats’ allegiance to neo-liberal deal making instead of meeting the needs of the rank and file resulted in a presidential defeat and Republican control of both houses of Congress. They long ago conceded fighting for control of state legislatures. The result is that the Republicans hold all the electoral cards.

Instead of fear we should be angry that we denounced what we once supported and supported what we once denounced in a losing effort to keep Democrats in office. We made a tacit agreement with the Democrats to follow them, at times blindly and at others with eyes wide open in exchange for protection from the white people’s party.

After supporting mass incarceration, the end of welfare as a right, regime change and austerity, the Democrats didn’t come through. They failed to prop up Hillary Clinton and now most of black America is shocked and fearful of what the Trump presidency will bring.

Every move Trump makes is followed like a sign of Armageddon. Announcements of his appointments and his bizarre ranting tweets are followed with obsessive fixation like watching a monster movie meant to create terror.

It is interesting that there has been no revolt against the Democratic Party and their coterie of black misleaders after this political debacle. Black people came to believe that not only were we supposed to give the Democrats carte blanche but, like domestic violence victims, we had to keep quiet about our humiliation too. Now we are alternately afraid, angry and confused because we still think we must censor ourselves about our bad political decision making.

There should be serious introspection amongst us now. We must ask ourselves how we ended up in this situation. The fault is not ours alone. Our liberation movement was crushed and leaders were imprisoned or killed. We began to err when we accepted the first foolish agreement to be satisfied with the success of a small group of people instead of working for everyone’s freedom. That thinking culminated in the joy of seeing Barack Obama elected president in 2008. In 2016 we watched his hollow legacy go down in flames to the man who said he wasn’t born in the United States.

Black people have always made the greatest strides when unafraid. We speak endlessly of the days of the liberation movement without appreciating what we accomplished. Racism was open as politicians and other “respectable” people had no qualms about using racial slurs and threatening and carrying out violence against us. Sometimes we voted with our feet away from the Jim Crow south and at other times we rose up in open rebellion. We did not allow fear to rule the day.

Now we quake in our boots with every announcement from the Trump transition team. Instead of panicking because Dr. Ben Carson will be secretary of HUD, we should remember that HUD exists at all because of the demands that black people made on our political system. Creating political crisis should be the order of the day. That has always been the game changer, not necessarily getting Democrats into office instead of Republicans.

Should we be able to reverse this fortune through electoral politics just remember who we will be resurrecting. Nancy Pelosi says that the Democratic Party doesn’t want a new direction. Senator Cory Booker is mentioned as a 2020 contender but Ivanka Trump and her husband raised $40,000 for his last campaign.

If Trumpism is to be destroyed it cannot be through the same measures that brought us to this ignominious political end. It also can’t be done with the same faces who brought us here or with bought off progressives. Al Gore and Tulsi Gabbard may stop by to kiss Donald’s ring but that doesn’t mean we must either “give him a chance” or believe the end is nigh.

The desire for self-determination brought people out of slavery and out of Jim Crow segregation. It can certainly save us from the alt-right, Donald Trump and an attorney general named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. We survived the Confederates and we can survive anyone named after them. That will mean shaking off fear, the Democrats, and the black misleaders all at once. We have never had anyone to depend on except ourselves. We do best when we acknowledge and honor that fact.

]]>Michael J. Sainatohttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889492016-12-08T17:27:28Z2016-12-09T08:55:13ZMore]]>On December 7, Donald Trumpselected Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the EPA.

The EPA has been criticized for being ineffective, and riddled in bureaucracy by those on the left and the right. In 2015, after the EPA in advertently dumped millions of gallons of toxic wastewater from the Gold King Mine into the Animas River upstream from the Navajo Nation, water rights activist Erin Brockovich wrote in a Facebook post, “Face it… they will never clean this up. Mining polluters and their USEPA “handlers” hope they can placate, manipulate, stipulate and dance their way out of yet another complete screw up. The US EPA, the Government of the United States, has used the Navajo Nation as there dumping ground for a century… turning a blind eye and counting on Lake Powell to repeatedly serve as their ‘catch all toilet.’” But Pruitt’s nomination is a giant step backwards in making the EPA an accountable and responsible government agency to help lead the fight against climate change, enforce environmental regulations, and take meaningful action to address environmental issues.

Bernie Sanderstweeted in response to the announcement, “Trump’s nominee to lead EPA, Scott Pruitt, is a climate denier who’s worked closely with the fossil fuel industry. That’s sad and dangerous.” Sanders attached a 2014 New York Times article which outlined Pruitt’s ties to Energy Firms whose interests are contrary to climate change initiatives. He added in a press release, “The American people must demand leaders who are willing to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels. I will vigorously oppose this nomination.”

During Pruitt’s service as Oklahoma’s Attorney General, the controversial oil extraction technique of fracking surged throughout the state. The Washington Post reported there are 73 drilling sites in Oklahoma. Fracking was first used to free natural gas from shale rock through hydraulic fracturing by George Mitchell in 1981. Mitchell, a Texas oil baron whose oil fields were drying up, desperately looking for alternative sources by drilling oil wells. By 1997, one of his fracking wells proved financially viable in the long term, and he sold his company, Mitchell Energy for $3.5 Billion. By that time, the drilling technique began to take off as other oil companies adopted it despite its well-documented adverse environmental and health effects. In Oklahoma, the widespread use of fracking has been linked to an eruption of earthquakes in the region, forcing the state to shutdown several dozen oil operations earlier this year.

The announcement of Pruitt’s nomination given his strong links to the oil and gas industry incited indignant responses from some of the largest environmental organizations in the country.

“Having Scott Pruitt in charge of the U.S. EPA is like putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires,” said Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune in a press release.

President of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Rhea Suh, added in a press release, “if confirmed, Pruitt seems destined for the environmental hall of shame, joining the likes of Anne Gorsuch Burford and James Watt, two disastrous cabinet officials in the 1980s.”

350.org co-Founder Bill McKibben published an op-ed in the New York Daily News criticizing Pruitt for serving as a “stenographer” of the oil and gas industry. “It goes without saying that he’ll continue to be a mouthpiece and a puppet at EPA, even though the entire point of the agency is to try and rein in pollution,” he wrote. “But now he won’t have to bother copying letters from the oil companies to send to himself. He’ll just be able to pick up the phone and get his marching orders firsthand.”

]]>Ron Jacobshttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889552016-12-08T18:13:12Z2016-12-09T08:54:44ZMore]]>The early 1980s were a scary time for gay men in the United States. I lived in Berkeley across the San Francisco Bay from one of the nation’s biggest gay communities. The news media was beginning to run more and more stories about a “new gay cancer.” Friends of mine who were both gay and male told me about a growing fear of some kind of disease that seemed to be spreading in the gay men’s community. The first obvious signs seemed to be a series of lesions that appeared on the afflicted individual’s body. This was accompanied by other illnesses that just would not go away no matter what medicines were tried. When I would be hanging out with these friends smoking weed, they would warn me not to smoke from the same bong or pipe. I didn’t know how serious to take their warnings. By 1985, four of my friends had died from the disease and at least six more were ill from it. By then, the disease was known as Auto Immunity Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), which was a better name for it than its original name Gay Related Immune Deficiency, but there were still very few answers regarding its origins or treatment. Also, by 1985, the disease was appearing in other segments of the population, especially intravenous drug users.

Opportunistic right wing politicians and hateful preachers were calling the epidemic the work of a wrathful god, while most liberal politicians were just ignoring it. The Reagan White House—a den of both opportunistic rightwingers and hate—refused to acknowledge the epidemic at all. Given this neglect, most medical providers were neither capable of treating those with the disease or slowing its transmission. The only humans willing to go into this abyss of neglect were some medical practitioners who were treating hundreds of people with AIDS, some People with AIDS and some of their lovers and friends. Homophobia was still a very dominant social reality in 1980s United States and gays and lesbians were legally and openly discriminated against in every walk of life.

This is the world author David France describes in his new book How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS. This more than 500 page work is a tour de force of reporting. A gay man who wrote about the AIDS epidemic for the New York alternative journal The New York Native from the days of the public’s first knowledge of the disease, France provides a history of the grassroots struggle to find a treatment that would allow People With AIDS (PWA) a means to live. The narrative he creates describes an uphill battle against the aforementioned political and religious establishment, a medical establishment with its own issues of homophobia and a pharmaceutical industry whose concern for maximum profit overrode most humane motivations. He weaves a personal history into his broader detailed text describing the arc of both the epidemic and the efforts to find a treatment.

This means that personal tales of his friends with AIDS bring an emotional emphasis to his descriptions of medical discoveries, patient advocacy, and battles with corporate chiefs and doctors more or less in their pocket. There are also accounts of the weekly meetings of various AIDS activist organizations, most prominently those of New York City’s chapter of ACT UP. The internal politics of these meetings are part of the narrative, too. There are heroes and there are villains. However, in France’s telling, both come across as three dimensional humans who cannot help but be affected by the constant death around them. That in itself means the supposed villains commit heroic acts while the supposed heroes occasionally expose their venal side, too. The detailed reportage of some of the ACT UP protest actions are simultaneously humorous, instructive and heart-wrenching. The impatience, fear, humor and determination of the ACT UP activists is at once tragic, courageous and audacious. As a protest organizer myself, the protests and actions described in How to Survive a Plague reminded me of how much ACT UP added to the nature and possibilities of political protest.

The 1980s were fearful times. The right wing was resurgent and neoliberal capitalism was beginning it profit-driven march to rule the world at the expense of working people, the environment and common sense. This fact is also part of France’s narrative. He describes the fight to get pharmaceutical companies—specifically Wellcome Burroughs—to lower its prices on AZT, the primary AIDS drug at the time and the drug company’s resistance to doing so. If one was a gay man, the fear present in the 1980s was increased at least ten fold. As the decade wore on, that increase of fear would be felt in numerous other subcultural communities in the United States and on the African continent, where AIDS was ravaging the population. Still, the pharmaceutical industry was looking for profit maximization.

How to Survive a Plague ends on a somewhat positive note culminating in the development of an understanding of how the virus worked and the manufacture of drugs to fight it. Nowadays, HIV and AIDS remain commonplace but are no longer the death sentence they once were. This medical fact is largely due to the persistence, intelligence and organization of the individuals and groups whose story is chronicled in David France’s text.

This work is an excellent history. The author skillfully weaves intimately personal tales of men suffering with AIDS and their efforts to find a cure with a broader history of the crisis. In the telling, the reader discovers the homophobia and venality of much of the government, the medical profession, and most of the religious establishment. At once both a medical thriller and political history, How to Survive a Plague is an achievement without any parallel to date; it is important, essential and very well told.

]]>David Swansonhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889692016-12-08T21:25:28Z2016-12-09T08:54:43ZMore]]>Virginia’s Constitution is three times as long as the U.S. Constitution (which is notably lacking any serious sections on oyster beds). Virginia’s Constitution has also been updated at least three times as much as the U.S. Constitution. But it is now long overdue.

The U.S. Constitution has been updated with 27 amendments and 0 serious revisions through conventions. Virginia’s Constitution has been amended many times including through five Constitutional conventions, held in 1830, 1851, 1864, 1870, and 1902. From 1776 to 1902 that’s one convention every 25 years. Now there hasn’t been one for 114 years.

I don’t want to revise the Virginia Constitution just for the heck of it, but because it is badly needed. There is much in the Virginia Constitution that needn’t be there at all, but that can be to our advantage if it facilitates opening the whole thing to desirable improvements. Some improvements are desirable because of the failure of the federal government to make them.

I wrote to my state legislators and governor asking that Virginia make voter registration automatic, the way some states have done. I was told that in Virginia this would require amending the Constitution. Unlike many other states, Virginia details voter registration processes in its Constitution. (One hopes it’s unnecessary to recall the ugly reasons why.) I’d amend the Constitution to make voter registration automatic, to delete the disenfranchisement of felons, and to delete the language permitting the creation of literacy tests for voting.

I’d delete a lot else that need not be enshrined in a Constitution, but I’d also add a lot that’s missing on the topic of voting rights and in many other areas.

Some general updates are obvious and easy: Add several missing categories to the forbidden reasons for discrimination (or take out the existing list and ban all discrimination). Change “men” to “people.” Delete the section creating marriage bigotry. Delete all promotion of religion from various sections including the section supposedly banning the establishment of religion.

But major revisions are in order as well. Look at this list of protected rights: “enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

Virginia executes people. One in 46 adults in Virginia is in prison, jail, parole, or probation. So much for life and liberty. Many Virginians have little or no means of acquiring and possessing property. And it’s hard to say we can obtain happiness and safety with environmental damage and danger as well as gun violence escalating. These existing elements of the Constitution need enactment and enforcement. Or they need stricter commitment in a revised Constitution. Similarly, the ban on standing armies isn’t sufficient to prevent the existence of the Virginia National Guard, and the ban on taking private property without compensation isn’t protecting anyone from oil pipelines or climate destruction or rising sea level.

But mostly the problem is the rights that are missing entirely or vaguely stated later in the Constitution. The U.S. approach of providing a safety net to the least well off simply is not working. The least well off don’t have political power. What works in other countries is to provide benefits to everyone, which almost everyone then supports. We need the right to a free top-quality education free of for-profit corruption and ridiculous tests from preschool through college. We need the right to free, bureaucracy-free, insurance-company-free, preventive universal single-payer healthcare. We need the right to a basic income for all. We need the right to a healthy and sustainable environment. The environment needs the right to health and sustainability. (Yes, giving rights to the environment makes at least as much sense as giving them to corporations — which should be explicitly barred — and is being done in modern Constitutions.)

The Virginia Constitution now reads: “Further, it shall be the Commonwealth’s policy to protect its atmosphere, lands, and waters from pollution, impairment, or destruction, for the benefit, enjoyment, and general welfare of the people of the Commonwealth.” But, of course, it is not the Commonwealth’s policy to do any such thing. This has to be made enforceable. Or it has to be enforced.

While the United States is the one nation on earth that has not joined the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Virginia should include the content of that treaty in its Constitution. It should do the same with the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It should also join the world in banning land mines, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, and nuclear weapons, and in establishing rights of migrant workers.

The section of the Virginia Constitution on the rights of the accused needs updating. There should be a right to videotape of all interrogations. There should be a right to competent legal representation. There should be a right not to be killed. There should be a ban on militarizing police and on the use of weaponized drones, as well as on the use in court of any evidence obtained by surveillance drones.

When it comes to election reforms, I would propose something like this:

The judiciary shall not construe the spending of money to influence elections to be protected free speech.

All elections for Governor and members of the Senate and General Assembly shall be entirely publicly financed. No political contributions shall be permitted to any federal candidate, from any other source, including the candidate. No political expenditures shall be permitted in support of any candidate, or in opposition to any candidate, from any other source, including the candidate. The legislature shall, by statute, provide limitations on the amounts and timing of the expenditures of such public funds and provide criminal penalties for any violation of this section.

State and local governments shall regulate, limit, or prohibit contributions and expenditures, including a candidate’s own contributions and expenditures, for the purpose of influencing in any way the election of any candidate for state or local public office or any state or local ballot measure.

Citizens will be automatically registered to vote upon reaching the age of 18 or upon becoming citizens at an age above 18, and the right to vote shall not be taken away from them.

Votes shall be recorded on paper ballots, which shall be publicly counted at the polling place and reported to a central counting location, with the process repeated as many times as required to allow voters to make use of ranked-choice (instant runoff) voting.

Election day shall be a state holiday.

During a designated campaign period of no longer than six months, free air time shall be provided in equal measure to all candidates for state office on state or local television and radio stations, provided that each candidate has, during the previous year, received the supporting signatures of at least five percent of their potential voting-age constituents.

The same supporting signatures shall also place the candidate’s name on the ballot and require their invitation to participate in any public debate among the candidates for the same office.

The Virginia Constitution now states: “That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people, that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all times amenable to them.”

I would give this concrete form in a right to create and vote on public initiatives to determine state policy, including the creation of Constitutional conventions and amendments.

]]>Louis Proyecthttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889592016-12-09T17:35:35Z2016-12-09T08:54:35ZMore]]>Notwithstanding my advice to CounterPunch readers to junk Netflix, it is still worth the membership fee for many of the European television shows they reprise such as Wallander and for their own productions such as Narcos that I have been watching for the past several weeks. As you may know, this series now in Season Two is about the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar, the leader of the Medellín cartel that shipped billions of dollars worth of cocaine into the USA in the 1980s, and who is played brilliantly by Brazilian actor Wagner Moura.

Narcos has very few deep insights about the social and economic context for the rise of the drug industry so why would a Marxist film critic recommend it? The answer is that it is vastly entertaining and has enough background about the Colombian political context of the 1980s to motivate reading about the “war on drugs”. Like the “war on terror” and the Cold War that preceded it, it was one in a series of conflicts that were designed to mobilize Americans against a dreaded enemy after the fashion of the permanent warfare in Orwell’s 1984. When a population grows restive over declining economic prospects, what better way to suppress resistance than to redirect anger against an external threat? Indeed, you will find striking affinities between the hunt for Pablo Escobar and the one for Osama bin-Laden.

As it happens, Judicial Watch—the rightwing website that so many leftists have relied on for proof that the USA promoted the growth of ISIS in Syria—has connected the dots between Mexican drug cartels and ISIS operatives sneaking across the border:

According to JW’s sources the Islamic terrorists have joined forces with the renowned Juárez drug cartel, which has long controlled the region. “Coyotes” are used to move ISIS operatives through the dessert and across the border between Santa Teresa and Sunland Park, New Mexico as well as the porous border between Acala and Fort Hancock, Texas.

Narcos does have some of the same tendencies to bend the facts but is quite reliable on many of the details, especially when they involve the battlefield strategies of the Colombian military, its American puppet masters and Escobar’s private army. Unlike network shows about the drug wars such as Miami Vice that depicted Crockett and Tubbs as unvarnished heroes, the two American DEA agents featured in Narcos are depicted more like Dirty Harry, breaking or bending Colombian law as they beat, torture or kill Escobar’s men while in custody.

Unlike Crocket and Tubbs, the DEA agents in Narcos are characters based on real people. Voice over narration comes from Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook) whose partner is Javier Peña (Pedro Pascal), an agent born in Texas. Both men are still alive and can be seen in a documentary titled The True Story of Killing Pablo based on a book by Mark Bowden, the author of Black Hawk Down.

The drama of Narcos is similar to that of The French Connection. As each episode unfolds, you watch the two DEA agents pursuing their prey like they were Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider. In the chess game that pitted Escobar against the Americans and the Colombian state, the drug lord is a master strategist—as skilled as Bobby Fischer and just as insane. Instead of chess openings like Ruy Lopez or the Spanish Game, Escobar relies on “Plata o Plomo”, the Spanish words for silver or lead. Their meaning: if bribes (plata) did not work, then bullets (lead) must suffice in protecting the Medellín cartel from prosecution and its leaders from extradition.

Throughout the series, the principal dramatic tension revolves around Escobar’s attempts to avoid extradition to the USA, just as it was in real life. This involved major confrontations with the Colombian state that included the assassination of Luis Galán in 1989, a candidate for President from the Nuevo Liberalismo (New Liberalism) movement, a split from Colombia’s Liberal Party that had been the rival to the country’s Conservative Party in a two-party system similar to our own. After his death, his chief adviser César Gaviria took his place and was elected president in 1990 on a program that included support for an extradition treaty with the USA. During the campaign, Gaviria narrowly escaped being the victim of a bombing on a flight from Bogotá to Cali. One of Escobar’s men had boarded the plane with instructions to tape record the conversations of other passengers, having no idea that the recorder concealed a powerful bomb. At the last minute, Gaviria did not board the plane after becoming convinced that a plot to kill him was real. It is in scenes such as this that Narcos is at its most compelling.

In many ways, the war between the Colombian state and the Medellín drug cartel overlapped with other violent Reagan administration interventions in Latin America. Like the war on drugs, Reagan was also pursuing a war on communism that Pablo Escobar often played off one side against another.

As a young and aspiring gangster, Escobar employed anti-imperialist rhetoric that would later be used in his public denunciations of the extradition treaty that he rightfully characterized as an American attack on Colombian sovereignty even though his main motivation was in remaining wealthy and free. We see him developing a united front with the M-19 guerrilla group that while not as well-known as the FARC or the ELN far exceeded them in boldness of tactics. Like Escobar, the group opposed extradition but more from a genuine anti-imperialist standpoint than out of self-interest. Escobar promised millions of dollars to the group in exchange for them raiding the Palace of Justice on November 6th, 1985 and taking the Supreme Court hostage. As part of the action, they were instructed to destroy police records implicating Pablo Escobar.

When the army stormed the building, 100 people were killed including nearly half of the Supreme Court justices. Journalist and TV anchorwoman Virginia Vallejo, who was Escobar’s lover, wrote an account of the siege that blamed the military for most of the deaths. So compelling was the case she made that a number of high-ranking military men went to prison based on her testimony. Belisario Betancourt, the Conservative Party president of Colombia in 1985, ordered the army to detonate a bomb in the building that had 400 people inside. None of this is reflected in Narcos.

The other glaring falsification in Narcos involves a drug dealer named Barry Seal, who was supposedly involved in a drug smuggling operation with the Medellín cartel and top officials of the Sandinista government. Played by Dylan Bruno in episode 4 of Season One, he is taken at his word that the “commies” were involved in the drug trade.

As I watched this episode with my wife, I turned to her and said, “This doesn’t sound right to me. I am sure that Seal was part of a sting operation designed to make the Sandinistas look bad.” It turns out that my memory of the period did not fail me as borne out in Jeff St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn’s Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press.

If Narcos succeeds as swiftly paced police procedural and as a relatively reliable account of the drug wars in Colombia in the 1980s and 90s, it is not so nearly as useful in helping us understand what could make the country such fertile soil for the drug trade. By contrast, the 1989 British series Traffik portrayed the Afghan/Pakistani heroin trade from the very top (with the East Asian equivalents of Escobar) to the very bottom—in this instance a ruined poppy farmer who goes to work as a truck driver for a German-based syndicate. Steven Soderbergh made Traffic in 2004, a film based on the British TV series but relocated to Mexico. Unfortunately, the film had much more in common with Narcos, relying on police procedural elements rather than reflecting on socio-economic factors.

To understand why the Colombian drug industry took off in Cali as well as Medellín, you have to start with the nation’s history, one in which the utter disjunction between rulers and ruled cultivated an indifference to law and order. When those at the top are criminals, why should a poor peasant stay within the law especially when he has to feed a hungry family?

To paraphrase Tolstoy, every Latin American country is unhappy but each in its own way. What follows is the story of Colombia’s unhappiness.

Simon Bolívar tried valiantly to carry out a bourgeois-democratic revolution in Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador, but the cowardly and unpatriotic bourgeoisie would not lead it, let alone cooperate. Symbolic of this failure was his own vice-president Francisco de Paula Santander, who had no grand vision for the continent but merely articulated the petty ambitions of the agrarian gentry and urban middle-class.

Bolívar’s army, composed of people of mixed African, Indian and white races that anticipated the guerrilla armies of Sandino and Castro, proved inadequate to the task of revolutionizing society. After Bolívar retired in 1830, the shrunken army was no longer a guarantor of revolutionary plebian interests and soon became superseded by civilian political rule, divided between the two major parties, Liberal and Conservative, that would betray Colombian national interests until the present day.

The two parties saw each other as rivals, but their real rival were the popular classes. The Liberals sought to modernize the state and reduce the influence of the Catholic Church, while the Conservatives sought to maintain the status quo. No matter how much they disagreed with each other, even to the point of resorting to arms, they agreed on the big question, which was how to exploit Colombia’s agricultural wealth without allowing the mass of peasants to own or control the land, or the right to share in its benefits.

The fundamental contradiction in Latin American capitalism is this: Capitalist agriculture for the export market requires preservation of the hacienda system, which provides the social base for the Conservative Party and semifeudal reaction. On the other hand, the modern state requires tax revenues and democratic participation from a mass social base of small proprietors, such as the shopkeepers and peasants who provided the shock troops of the French Revolution. Since Colombia, and no other Latin American country, can resolve this contradiction, tensions persist and periodically erupt in bloody conflicts where the two bourgeois parties become surrogates for deeper class antagonisms.

And when it comes to capitalist agriculture, no other commodity defined Colombia as did coffee. Just as cocaine, another addictive stimulant, provides the fuel for the Colombian economy today, so did coffee in an earlier time. Although Colombia entered the 20th century with the weakest economy next to Haiti’s, by the 1930s it had become a powerhouse. Coffee production rose from 40 to 70 percent of exports by 1930 and Colombia ranked fourth in Latin America in terms of volume of external trade.

Although coffee exports enriched the elite, the coffee growers failed to enjoy the benefits. Starting in the 1940s, they begin shifting toward the left until spontaneous rebellions led to the formation of the FARC. When the governments, either Liberal or Conservative, launched a scorched earth attack on the peasantry, many fled to the cities for safety including Medellín that was in the heart of coffee country.

With little gainful employment awaiting them, they were ripe for recruitment into the cartels especially since Pablo Escobar was spending millions on projects that benefited the poor such as housing and soccer fields, not to speak of generous cash outlays that were often the only way poor people could stay alive. This led to a fanatical support for “El Patron”. As we shall see, despite the populist leanings of Pablo Escobar, he regarded the FARC and the left as mortal enemies.

Colombia did not start out with cocaine production, but actually was a major producer of marijuana in the 1970s especially along the Atlantic Coast. The USA pressured Colombia to make war on the pot growers and was largely successful. By 1980, according to Jenny Pearce, the author of Colombia: Inside the Labyrinth, more than 40 percent of marijuana was grown in the USA and Jamaica was supplying the remainder. The consequences for the Atlantic Coast of Colombia bereft of the marijuana trade income were devastating, as crime, unemployment and economic insecurity increased dramatically.

Relief came in the form of cocaine traffic, however. Coca grown in Peru and Bolivia was processed in Colombia to supply the new demand in North America. The cocaine trade eventually replaced coffee as the number one supplier of foreign revenue. In 1984 it is estimated that between 10 and 12 billion dollars was flowing into the Colombian economy due to the cocaine trade.

It was around this time that the Colombian drug cartels joined forces with the ultraright against the guerrillas. For all of the allegations about partnership between the FARC and the drug traffickers, there is little attention paid to this recent history. The cocaine Mafia arrived late in Colombian society, but it followed exactly the same pattern as the coffee bourgeoisie. It financed both of the two major parties and private armies in defense of its class interests. This led to fierce intra-class clashes in the Colombian ruling class as it tried to both fight off and co-opt noveau riche Mafioso figures like Pablo Escobar.

But despite these family quarrels, the cocaine Mafia was determined to show its allegiance to old-fashioned Colombian values, especially anti-communism. Cocaine billionaire and Escobar partner Carlos Lehder set up his own fascist party, the Movimiento Latino Nacional, to defend his interests on the vast acreage housing cocaine factories that he had bought up with drug profits. This outfit joined forces with the Movimiento Sanitario Amplio (MAS) to kill suspected guerrillas and left-wing politicians.

One of the ironies of recent Colombian history is the transformation of Medellín into a city that is a citadel of capitalist law and order, as well as integration into the global economy. To start with, the Colombia state resorted to drastic measures in order to finally stamp out the drug trade as Forrest Hylton described in a March-April 2007 New Left Review article titled Medellín’s Makeover that is behind a paywall. The article begins:

Medellín, the most conservative city in Colombia, the continent’s most conservative country, has been undergoing a dramatic boom for the past few years. Levels of high-rise construction now surpass those of Los Angeles and New York combined. Since 2002, the profusion of apartment towers, luxury hotels, supermarkets and shopping malls has been breathtaking. The country’s largest conglomerates and over seventy foreign enterprises now have their Colombian headquarters in Medellín, among them Phillip Morris, Kimberly Clark, Levi Strauss, Renault, Toyota and Mitsubishi. A 30,000 square-foot convention centre opened in 2005, and over a dozen international conferences have been held there annually, generating more than $100 million in investment and business deals.

It turns out that law and order was restored by Don Berna, a former partner of Escobar who is played by Mauricio Cujar in Narcos. After deciding that Escobar’s days were numbered, Berna hooks up with the Cali cartel, the DEA and the Colombian cops to wipe out Escobar’s empire. Hylton is worth quoting at some length to wrap things up:

In The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Barrington Moore famously described European feudalism as ‘gangsterism that had become society itself’. Don Berna’s trajectory from hired gun to mafia don to ‘pacifier’ of Medellín epitomizes the re-feudalization of power in Colombia’s neo-liberalized economy, underwritten by cocaine profits as the former, industrial model was based on coffee. This fusion of politics, property and organized crime, reflected in the paramilitary grip over security for capital investment, links the city’s bad old days to its good new ones, and largely determines the present and future shape of the built environment. Following Don Berna’s victory, homicide and violent-crime rates fell precipitously, even as the city’s first mass graves for the uncounted dead were uncovered in the central-west and northeast. In the late 1990s, publicly sanctioned security forces ‘cleansed’—limpiaron—a large area of the city centre, dominated by a red-light district and open-air market on the north side and a street of gay salons to the west. Hired thugs threatened, displaced or murdered the district’s ‘disposable’ inhabitants—drug sellers, addicts, prostitutes, street kids, petty thieves, called desechables—to make it safe for urban redevelopment. After 2000, this city-wide ‘pacification’ campaign was supported by state-security forces, businessmen, politicians of both parties and the Catholic Church.

‘Pacification’ is the condition of possibility for the much-touted improvements in tourism, investment and security. Taking the credit for it, Don Berna explained that his troops understood the need to create the ‘necessary climate so that investment returns, particularly foreign investment, which is fundamental if we do not want to be left behind by the engine of globalization’. While continuing to manage extortion, contract killing, gambling, drug sales, etc., Don Berna has also had an important hand in construction, transport, wholesale and retail, finance, fashion, private security, real-estate development and cable television. In the 2004 elections, thirty of Don Berna’s candidates won posts as heads of neighbourhood associations, the Juntas de Acción Comunal. They ran through an NGO called Corporación Democracia, led by Giovanni Marín, alias ‘Comandante R’, a butcher turned ideologue who ran for Congress in 2006. According to Marín, ‘My conscience is clear. People should know that we collaborated in pacifying the city; that we handed over a city at peace.’

What experience and history teach us is this- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

— Hegel

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

— Karl Marx

Will Trump’s foreign policy deviate from the immediate, or for that matter, the distant past? Many voters who supported him are mainly concerned with his pledge to bring back jobs yet the economic program Trump proposes will not remotely fulfill that promise. A trade war with China will nix that agenda and inflame the military tensions already in evidence from Obama’s “pivot to Asia.” Throughout the campaign most pundits believed that Wall Street was backing Clinton yet it is extremely interesting that the stock market has soared into record territory with big banks, and arms businesses leading much of the gains. He presents contradictory proposals. Throughout the campaign he has said he wants to renegotiate the terms of the NATO alliance, tamp down the demonization of Russia and stop the arms buildup along its borders. Yet, he is also talking tough on China. Based on a program pushed by the Heritage Foundation, Trump has also promised vastly to increase spending to rebuild the American military which he claimed has been allowed to atrophy and which he intends to unleash on ISIL. He seems to believe the defeat of Islamic terrorism will follow rapidly and thoroughly once this occurs. His “national security” team is top heavy with former military, congressional hawks, neo-cons and Islamophobes. What then will be the role of his bulked up military? History more than suggests that there is no reason to suppose that interventionist and aggressive foreign policy will now magically cease. After all war is and always has been the American way of life.

How else do we possess these dis-United States? The American people, colonists or citizens, have been at war since 1607. Of course our national mythology insists it was always the other guy’s fault. Absent from most mainstream accounts is the simple fact that U.S. policies have always had gain at other peoples’ expense at their core. We forget that the early British colonies were established as joint-stock companies, the antecedent of the modern corporation. Thus their primary function was to exploit the resources of the “new world”- fish, fur, lumber- and make profit for the investors. As the colonial markets grew, closely aligned in triangular trade to London and its other colonies, the principal measure of gain rapidly became pecuniary. As an astute French observer of the early American republic observed “As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in (Alexis de Tocqueville)?”

During the early colonial period the preoccupation was the acquisition of land. Today we tend to dismiss the campaigns against the aboriginal peoples as insignificant, especially when compared to the world wars, or the Civil War. But warfare against those tribes was constant until the late 19th Century and resulted in enormous carnage and the extinction of many. The Massachusett come immediately to mind. Nothing but their name remains of them. In King Philip’s War, the first outright war waged in British North America between colonists and natives, a higher percentage of people per capita of total population (native and colonist) died than in any of the U.S.’s other wars. This was tragically ironic since the father of Metacomet, the native who led the campaign against the colonists had enabled the Plymouth Plantation to survive in the first place (that was Massasoit of the Thanksgiving legend). To ensure that natives got the message about resisting colonization Metacomet’s head was displayed in Plymouth Town square for twenty years. In a new study Benjamin Madley exposes how white Californian settlers and their political barons called for and acted to ensure what they had no trouble naming the “extinction” of that states aboriginal population well into the late 19th Century (An American Genocide). Visualize Ishi, found starving in 1911, after the remaining members of his tribe, the Yahi, had been killed the same year by white bounty hunters.

We also downplay the guerrilla campaigns to wrest the territory European powers-British, French, Spanish- claimed to the west of the original thirteen states. And then there was the Mexican War that extended the U.S. border “from sea to shining sea,” brought about by the mendacity of President James Polk who claimed that “American blood had been shed on American soil.” The truth was that U.S. soldiers were killed as they conducted raids on Mexican land in furtherance of a strategy to promote outright war and then expand the territory for slavery, the pillar of the American economy for two and a half centuries. Of course northern banking and commercial textile interests also stood to profit greatly. “Manifest Destiny” expansionists concurred in this land grab too since that would result in the acquisition of vital Pacific ports which then could launch further extension into the Pacific. William Henry Seward, who would later acquire Alaska as the “drawbridge to Asia” avowed that control of the North American continent would “ensure the controlling interest of the world”… “Multiply your ships,” he urged “and send them forth to the East… The nation that draws most materials and provisions from the earth, and fabricates the most and sells the most…must be, and will be the great power of the earth.” In short order (1853) seeking safe harbors from which to penetrate the landmass of Asia, the U.S. overtly threatened Japan with armed force to open her doors to commerce on terms dictated by American warships. The result was that the island nation would soon imitate and compete with her European and American challengers, seeking to beat them at their own game, leading ultimately to the Pacific War of the 20th century and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Americans are highly propagandized to believe that U.S. foreign policy has always had as its mainstay and central focus our “national security” not matters so dull as commercial exploitation and financial dominance. Indeed the Truman Administration created the “National Security State” immediately after World War II-the very moment when the U.S. wielded unparalleled and awesome military might while the former empires were at their weakest or lay in ruin. In other words, when there was absolutely no threat. Germany and Japan were prostrate but so were the U.S.’s allies. The Soviet menace was invoked as a grave peril but the reality was that the USSR was utterly devastated, had suffered upwards of 30 million deaths (compared to 400,000 American deaths), and had over 70,000 of its cities and towns reduced to rubble. It did have the largest land army on the planet but that force had been the principle and indispensable agent of Nazi defeat, though we like to imagine that was accomplished by American forces. The USSR had no navy or airforce capable of crossing oceans and displayed no intent to move beyond the territories wrested from Nazi control. Nevertheless much ink and rhetoric accused the Soviets of aggression and the illegitimate takeover of much of Eastern Europe as justification for the claim that now the USSR constituted a peril to world peace and order and had to be confronted at every turn.

Hidden was the simple fact that nations like Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and even many Ukrainians had allied with the Third Reich and aided the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The USSR defeated those allies of Nazi Germany too and subjugated them, just as the Soviets and the U.S. occupied and co-ruled Germany. The so-called Iron Curtain was a shield against another armed invasion from the West, the Soviet’s cordon sanitaire, however harsh it was for those under its rule, though to be sure Washington didn’t and doesn’t really care about human rights, all posturing to the contrary (note the brutal murderous dictatorships we have sponsored). Hidden too was the fact that the Soviets showed no evidence of the armed aggression proclaimed by Western propaganda. The Red Army withdrew from Mongolia, from Iran, from Korea and eventually from Austria. The U.S. could not have impelled them to retreat from areas they had taken with large cost. The Soviets withdrew on their own, thus disproving the claim that they were bent on “world conquest.”

During WWII neither Germany nor Japan had the military capacity to invade the United States and all in power knew this. Franklin Roosevelt lied to the public when he said that he possessed copies of a secret plan by Hitler to conquer the Western hemisphere. This document had been forged by British intelligence and the very idea was preposterous. Placing its services at the disposal of government, and in order to frighten the general public, Hollywood issued sophisticated propaganda films and faked footage to depict Japanese soldiers marching down Constitution Avenue.

Why this elaborate gambit to overcome public opposition to entering another global war? What was the real fear on the part of American rulers? FDR condemned the early anti-Jewish persecutions like kristalnacht but did nothing to rescue Jews except symbolically at the end of the war when two-thirds of Jews and many others were dead. We then have to make sense of Washington’s active recruitment of high-level Nazis to bolster the new CIA, and rocket and bio-warfare research. Our oft touted humanitarian concerns were duplicitous and hypocritical at best. Put simply, the Third Reich and Japan were sealing off huge areas of the globe from American commerce and investment and obstructing the main pillar of U.S. foreign policy, i.e. the Open Door to the resources, markets and labor power of the planet to be accessed on American terms. Closure of much of Europe and Asia by the Axis to American commercial and investment activity had exacerbated the continuing collapse of the American economy and social order brought on by the Great Depression As historian Thomas McCormick put matters, “living space for Germany and Japan was dying space for American private enterprise and for capitalism as an integrated world system.” Wall Street saw a “nightmare of a closed world.” The real issue after the defeat of the Axis was that the Soviets occupied about half of what the Nazis had seized in eastern Europe, and locked American commerce and capital investment out, just as the Nazis had.

Early on extremely intemperate voices, some from within the military, challenged Truman to employ the expanding atomic arsenal to get rid of the alleged threat immediately, calls that were often reported in the media, and to which the Soviets paid careful attention. There is no doubt but that such inflammatory declamations intensified Soviet fears of the United States who stepped-up production of their own A-Bombs, leading to the result that the only true threat to our national security, if by that we mean physical military danger, is nuclear war. We have no one to blame but ourselves for that un-sheathed sword of Damocles hanging perpetually over our heads. The sheer cold-bloodedness of using A-bombs on the civilian population of a nation already defeated was not lost on the Soviets, or later the Chinese. Certainly Stalin recognized that the United States could be as ruthless as himself.

All of the above, according to Trumpites and many others, places me firmly in the camp of the enemy. I hope soon to be on the new McCarthyite blacklist and am proud to be associated with Counterpunch. For 30 years now I’ve taught a highly critical view of United States foreign policy at the urban campus of a major state university. Most of the native born (as opposed to those with student visas) are working class or lower middle class and some can be quite incredulous and assertive in their reaction to my perspective but a majority want to hear more, certainly because they come from the classes most affected by war and economic downturns and uncertainty. Veterans often seek out my courses. Some are highly supportive of my perspective and conclusions. But some are viscerally opposed. One even wrote on our “free expression wall” some years ago that I should be lined up and shot. But if there is one sure thing I’ve learned in all these years it is that few students, or many among the greater public, know much of anything concrete and accurate about their nation’s past. What they have absorbed inevitably is the national mythology of exceptionalism that has been propagated from every source-school, religion, television, Hollywood, politics etc.- all their (our) lives.

Given the omnipresence and power of corporate controlled mass propaganda all citizens are constantly bombarded with messages about American exceptionalism, coupled with dishonesty, deceit and out right fabrications about current policies and the past. It is fortunate now that the alternative media exists in the electronic sphere and that universities, at least some, still adhere to free speech principles. If you think such rights are always safe examine the chronicle of censorship and vicious repression during World War I.

When leading discussion about “the American way of war” I sometimes get a version of the “killer ape” thesis popular back in the 1970s according to which humans are genetically aggressive and murderous toward the “other” like our close relatives the chimpanzees. To this assertion I always ask “how many people have you killed?” Of course the answer is always “none” (vets always remain silent here too). The fact is that murderousness in the general population, despite lurid and frightening headlines about violence, is confined to a small minority and consists most often of crimes of passion or pathology. It is not intrinsic to human behavior. I say this as someone who has been the victim of an anonymous street shooting that wounded me badly and killed two other people, all of us unknown to the shooter. Such outrages are on the increase but they signify growing social pathology and alienation owing to expanding poverty, economic insecurity, profound resentment and outright fear occasioned by the media. They do not prove the genetic aggression thesis. Given the all but effortless availability of guns, mass slaughter should be running rampantly every hour, if that proposition were true. Of course the media requirement that “if it bleeds it leads” falsely encourages this sense of widespread, omnipresent danger.

How then do we really account for our wars and the massive violence and casualties it visits on entire countries? How did the millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians killed during that war really threaten American national security? In all the handwringing about the suffering of desperate Syrians who in the corporate media acknowledges the fact that Washington encouraged the revolt against the Assad regime, and armed its “moderate” rebels who promptly shared them with Al Qaeda and ISIL? Iraq and Libya are in chaos as a direct result of American military actions, their populations living in misery. Yemen is being disassembled by Saudi bombing with U.S. aircraft. In all these cases the claim is made that the U.S. wished to liberate these nations from cruel dictatorships but given the slaughter that has followed from American military actions can anyone really take seriously the claim of “responsibility to protect”? Though all officials know that the U.S. is invulnerable to invasion in order to gain public acceptance some threat to our security must be invoked. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s the “permanent war economy” was in trouble but the void was filled quickly by the threat of Islamic terrorism though a citizen has a better chance of being struck by lightning than being killed by al Qaeda or ISIL. But the fear mongering works to frazzle whole segments of the population who thus condone the dispatch of troops.

Does the American military recruit only those who do show signs of homicidal intent? Such dangerous personalities do squeeze into the armed forces but preparing and motivating most soldiers to kill other human beings requires an intensive program of abusive psychological indoctrination and conditioning. Much of it centers on the constant drumbeat that the armed forces are the indispensable shield against all threats to American “freedom and democracy,” the firewall against the “evil doers.” But a good deal more than that is required to send troops thousands of miles away in search of monsters to destroy. Patriotism is rigorously defined and enforced as standing at attention and following orders unquestioningly. For those in the “military occupational specialties” focused on direct combat the training regime is brutal to civilian eyes and focused on a longstanding very specific cult of “manhood” in which physical prowess and nerve is esteemed and weakness and cowardice are the cardinal sins. Shame at failing to measure up is to be dreaded. Facing death for one’s country is the ultimate test of manhood. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Is it symptomatic of our metastasizing militarization that women are now trying to break into the deadly mystique of the “warrior” with the avowal that this corresponds to “equality.”

Yet the vast majority of soldiers never do kill. Even those in combat units do not usually kill “up close and personal” but from a distance using their weaponized machines and many never even see those whom their firepower has snuffed. And, despite all the operant conditioning, being exposed to the imminence of violent death and mass killing incurs profound spiritual and psychological consequences that will haunt many for life.

And let us stop ignoring the fact that with few exceptions those who initiate wars and send others off to kill or die have never themselves served in combat, or otherwise endangered their lives or fortunes on behalf of the republic, nor would they dream of putting their progeny at risk. That task belongs to the lower orders, the “expendables” as World War II soldiers often referred to themselves, or as “snuffies,” in the parlance of my generation.

So what are the real motivations of those who send our posterity off to kill and die? Since our present era is often labelled a new “Gilded age” and likened to similar circumstances more than a century ago the words of the barons of yesteryear illuminate that question just as readily for today. The Gilded age was not golden for most Americans. Beneath the glitter severe depressions, unemployment, immiseration and social upheaval were the order of the day. To meet the dangers emanating from below the American ruling elites turned the public’s attention outward and leapt onto the stage of global competition with the other great and emerging powers.

The rapid evolution of finance and industrial capitalism and the emergence of steam power and electricity and the ascendance of mass production all but erased the previous lifestyles and occupations of millions of Americans. With farmwork formerly done by hand and draft animals now replaced by machines millions were cast into poverty and into burgeoning city slums. At the same time demand for poorly paid labor to service the machines increased exponentially and led to the admission of millions of immigrants and thereby exacerbated social tensions. In the willy-nilly scramble to profit in the new industrial order inevitable overproduction led to massive layoffs and depressions. Demands for a greater share of the wealth produced by the rapidly accelerating system inspired strikes and calls for unionization. Even the dreaded word “Socialism” filled the air. Faced with unparalleled upheaval the new barons and their political allies’ responded to the crisis from every quarter of the nation’s power and cultural institutions. To protect the imperative of profit and simultaneously meet the demands of the agitated population they determined only one solution-expansion.

The historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued in The Significance of the Frontier in American History that the widespread availability of land in the West had conferred substantial independence upon many Americans. The “dominant fact of American life has been expansion” Turner declared. For centuries the ever present frontier in the west had served as the “safety valve” to vent pent up social pressures. Dissatisfied Americans could pack up and go west to acquire land to then enter the marketplace in cattle, crops, timber and minerals and profit. But industrial expansion, railroads, telegraph and mushrooming population had brought the country to a “watershed moment.” By the late 19th Century, the continental limit had been reached. The nation faced a choice: either alter American social and economic conditions radically or expand. Therefore a new frontier beckoned, said Turner, the Pacific Ocean and beyond.

Jealous of British naval supremacy the navy soon added its voice. Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, in his enormously influential tract, The Influence of Seapower Upon History (still taught at the U.S. Naval Academy), urged political leaders to leap beyond the landed frontier to the oceans and establish “colonies” as markets for the surplus, sources for cheaper labor, and bases from which to protect and administer them. Mahan’s gaze fell upon China whose population he considered “sheep without a shepherd.” Seeing the vast land as “inefficient” he contended that its people were not entitled to control their own country, and even proposed that its capital Peking (Beijing) be moved southward out of Russian influence to become “the core around which to develop a new China.” The Chinese had other ideas though so in 1900 the U.S., along with other imperial powers, landed troops to quash the so-called Boxer Rebellion that arose in opposition to just such foreign intrusion. While most Americans have long since forgotten this episode the Chinese have not.

Such reveries would require the expansion of naval power, a proposition the emerging steel and ship building trusts and their Washington confederates, especially Theodore Roosevelt, leapt to initiate. As the U.S. provoked tensions with doddering Spain Teddy gushed that “I should say that I would welcome a foreign war. It is very difficult for me not to wish war with Spain for that would result at once in getting a proper navy. In strict confidence I should welcome almost any war.” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, scion of Boston “Brahmins,” boasted that “We have a record of conquest, colonization and expansion unequalled by any people in the 19th century …for the sake of our commercial prosperity we ought to seize the Hawaiian Islands now.” Roosevelt added that it “would be a crime against white civilization not to annex Hawaii.” Teddy then ginned up his war with Spain. Close advisers like historian Brooks Adams, descendant of John and John Quincy, thrilled that “this war is the first gun in the battle for ownership of the world.” In the Senate Albert Beveridge proclaimed that “The power that rules the Pacific rules the world.”

Spain was routed easily with aid from the “yellow press” and the U.S took over the Philippines, Guam, Cuba and Puerto Rico claiming to have liberated the island peoples from Spanish tyranny. Washington had also promised their independence yet when Filipinos actually tried to exercise their sovereignty the U.S. immediately launched a vicious campaign to stifle any hope of autonomy in pursuit of its own dishonestly disguised imperial ambitions. Though proponents of war condemned the atrocities Spain committed against it subjects they were silent when American troops behaved with savagery toward Filipinos whom they openly called “niggers.” What is today called “waterboarding,” was exercised widely by American forces against Filipino insurgents. Numerous massacres of civilians took place. One general ordered troops to kill “anyone over the age of ten.” Mark Twain stoked opposition to the campaign against Philippine independence in his widely read “On the Slaughter of 400 Moros” (there were actually more than 1,000). Responding sardonically to the U.S. Army’s report of a great victory against Filipino insurrectionaries, Twain noted that in fact there was no “battle.” American troops had forced about 1200 Moro men, women and children, into a ravine where most of them were slaughtered in cold blood. In disgust he also reviled the blood-soaked hypocrisy of Theodore Roosevelt who cabled the commander of U.S. forces saying “I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.”

Some religious leaders condemned such atrocities and the new imperial thrust but most mainstream clergy rushed to bless the new empire. Josiah Strong, a leading and highly influential Protestant figure, declared that “we are the chosen people” insisting “Anglo-Saxon” values had shaped America. In response to the urban and economic crisis he avowed that the world would “enter upon a new stage of its history, the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled…the representative of the purest Christianity, the highest civilization…and can anyone doubt that the results of this competition of the races will be the ‘survival of the fittest.” In sardonic mockery of such Puritan fundamentalism the journalist and social critic Ambrose Bierce wrote in contrast that “Mammon (the ancient god of money) is the god of the world’s leading religion. The chief temples are on Wall Street in the holy city of New York.”

Remarkably, “Christian Imperialism” dovetailed with new secular ideas supposedly based upon religion’s nemesis, science. No sooner had Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution gained traction among the “educated” classes than it was deformed into Social Darwinism to validate imperial conquest by Europeans and Americans alike. As white imperialists annexed or otherwise dominated non-white societies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, the very fact of their dominance was asserted to “prove” that natural law imposed the rule of the “fittest.” Historians like Brooks Adams, a descendant of two presidents and advisor to Theodore Roosevelt even argued that the new economy had arisen in the natural order of evolution writing that … “Masses take the form of corporations and the men who rise to the control of these corporations rise because they are fittest. The process is natural selection.” A corollary of this theory, of course, insisted that those who toiled as mere wage slaves or as colonial subjects were the least fit and deserved the place they occupied in society.

While Social Darwinian suppositions were developed at Yale and Cambridge universities, and therefore had the halo of “science” around them, the more gruesome applications like the massacre of Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890 employed a long established racism.

In the Senate, at the moment the U.S. took its place among the imperial powers of the planet, Albert Beveridge of Indiana defended the brutal war against Philippine independence and its atrocities when he encapsulated and conflated all of the prevailing ideological strands of his day in a speech remarkable for its sanction of naked imperialism.

God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for nothing but vain and idle self-admiration. No he has made us master organizers of the world…that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples…The Philippines are ours forever…and just beyond the Philippines lie China’s illimitable markets. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee under God, of the civilization of the world…the Philippines give us a base at the door of the East…it has been charged that our conduct of the war has been cruel. Senators, it has been the reverse. Senators, remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans. We are dealing with Orientals.

Forgotten today, Brooks Adams’s books had enormous influence and clearly the ideas he expounded yesteryear still remain the bedrock of American foreign policy today. In America’s Economic Supremacy he argued that the nation’s elites should centralize the economic and political life of the nation, acquire and safeguard key sources of energy, gain control of Asia and its markets and elevate someone “brimming with martial spirit” to lead the American people on what he saw as a “crusade” to fulfill the nation’s destiny.

What fundamentally has changed?

But wait! There is one major difference. In 1900 the U.S., as its rulers planned, stood ready to contend for global dominance. In 2000 the Project For a New American Century took ever U.S. foreign policy, noting that the collapse of the Soviet Union presented a virtual carte blanche ticket to American global supremacy. Today that fantasy lies in ruins but the masters have yet to realize this fact. Nor, as usual, have they shown any inclination to learn from history. Many now nominated or vying for position in the Trump Administration show every evidence of hostility toward all of Islam, with little distinction between Sunni ISIL or Shia Iran, bitter enemies both. Even before taking office Trump is trumping traditional diplomatic behavior toward China and deliberately ratcheting up friction, and despite Trump’s attitude toward Russia, the military itself sees that nation as the U.S.’s “existential threat.” The truly existential threat to our national security lies in the supremacist policies pursued since 1945 which have led to war after war and the slaughter literally of millions and which have led other nations, in fear of our own, to acquire nuclear weapons. As the Great Game of empire plays out and the consequences of the industrial age ravage the climate and ecology of the planet the trajectory of history more than implies all out nuclear war. Are we really going to let this end game play out?

Paul Lewis Atwood is a member of Veterans for Peace and is semi-retired from the University of Massachusetts Boston. His book War and Empire: The American Way of Life was published in 2010. He can be reached at paul.atwood@umb.edu.

]]>John Wighthttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889302016-12-08T17:09:32Z2016-12-09T08:54:20ZMore]]>The killing and wounding of Russian medical personnel in a rocket attack on a military field hospital in Aleppo raises again the question of who is actively lending support to terrorism in Syria, people depicted in the West as ‘moderates’ in a monstrous inversion of the truth.

Such has been the Goebbelsian nature of western media coverage of the conflict in Aleppo, Nusra Front (now Jabhat Fateh al-Sham) have morphed from a terrorist organization, which in its methodology and objectives is near indistinguishable from ISIS, into a latter day version of the French resistance or Partisans of Second World War repute. In the process the only real moderates engaged in the conflict in Syria – the Syrian Arab Army, Russia, Iran, and other allies – have been demonized, accused of targeting and terrorizing civilians, including children, when they have in fact been liberating them.

History will not be kind to those who have propagated the lie that something approximating to a democratic revolution has been underway in Syria. On the contrary, the country and its people have suffered the depredations of an Islamic Khmer Rouge, intent on ‘purifying’ a multicultural and multi-religious society of minority communities that are able to trace their existence in this part of the world back over a millennia and more.

The overwhelming majority of Syrians, without whose support the government would have collapsed long before now, utterly reject the ideology of these extremists, thousands of them non-Syrians who’ve descended on the country from across the Muslim world and beyond like a plague of locusts, taking advantage of the destabilization of the region wrought by Washington and its allies in recent years.

The sinister aspect to the conflict in Syria, which the attack on the Russian military field hospital raises, is the extent to which these so-called rebels have enjoyed the support of western and regional powers. How else are we to explain the way they have been able to survive for so long? Who has been supplying them with the weaponry, money, material, intelligence, and logistics support that has allowed them to do so?

Russia in particular has been vilified in the West over its role in the conflict. Indeed a neo-McCarthyite anti-Russian propaganda offensive has been waged across Europe in response to Russia’s military mission in the country. It is a propaganda offensive that has intensified in recent in parallel with the operation to liberate Aleppo. We have seen Russian media outlets, such as RT and Sputnik International, being targeted, its representatives hauled before parliamentary select committees in the UK to ‘explain themselves’, accused of peddling pro-Russian propaganda rather than news. We have also seen US State Department spokesman, John Kirkby, refuse to take a legitimate question from an RT correspondent, attacking her credentials.

There is an insidious element to this unprecedented level of Russia-bashing in the West, wherein it is not Russia’s government that is being demonized but Russia itself – with the clear inference that the Russian character is inherently dishonest, underhand, wicked, etc.

Enough is enough.

It is no longer credible, much less ethical, to describe people engaged in acts of mass murder and slaughter in Paris, London, Brussels, or in the US, as terrorists, while at the same time describing those responsible for the same murder and slaughter in Syria as ‘rebels’. In fact it is obscene beyond measure.

Like Afghanistan, like Iraq, and like Libya, in Syria a grotesque experiment in human despair has been taking place, wherein murder and extremism has been presented as resistance and revolution, with those struggling to protect civilians from terrorism depicted as the terrorists. George Orwell himself could not have done better than produce what passes for western media coverage in this regard.

You can either stand with those who are fighting religious extremism and sectarianism or you can stand with the extremists and sectarians. What you cannot do is both – i.e. rhetorically maintain a position of being against extermism while acting against those who are risking their lives fighting it on the ground. It is why the enemy of people in Britain, France, and the US is the hypocrisy of their own governments and media acolytes.

Syria, thanks to the tenacity of its armed forces, will not go the same way as the countries already mentioned – Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya – and see its society disfigured, its development destroyed, and its culture despoiled in service to a hegemonic agenda that has been responsible for human suffering on a grand scale. While it may take years to be rebuilt, given the scale and brutal nature of the conflict that has engulfed it, rebuilt it will be.

What will never be rebuilt are the reputations and integrity of those who have written a new page in the annals of mendacity and duplicity, both of which have underpinned the West’s words and actions when it comes to Aleppo and the wider conflict in Syria.

To paraphrase none other than Winston Churchill, in the West the truth when it comes to Syria is being protected by a bodyguard of lies.

]]>Richard Hardiganhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889732016-12-08T21:53:47Z2016-12-09T08:54:13ZMore]]>I attended the funeral of a man named Ahmed just a few days after I had arrived in Palestine. It took place in the El Ain refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus. The day before, Ahmed had been praying in the camp mosque, and when he emerged from the mosque, Israeli soldiers shouted at him to stop where he was. But Ahmed, who was mentally handicapped, did not understand, and, becoming confused, he did not comply. The soldiers responded by shooting him four times, once in the chest and three times in the stomach.

Two months later, on one of my last days in Palestine, I watched as an Israeli sniper team commandeered the house of a Palestinian family in Hebron. The soldiers climbed onto the roof of the house, and waited, their trigger fingers itchy, for over an hour, until they found a suitable target. Two Palestinian teens were milling around on the roof of a building about two hundred meters away. The teens were not doing anything of note, but after twenty minutes one of them picked up a stone and languidly threw it off the building. There were clashes nearby at the time. The team immediately went into action and cut him down, shooting him in the leg. The soldiers celebrated, clapping each other on the shoulder, even mocking their hapless victim.

Both of these incidents constituted heinous crimes, and I felt the world deserved to know about what was occurring in the Occupied Territories. And so I wrote and published articles about these and many other crimes that the Israeli authorities have committed and continue to commit. Do my actions make me an anti-Semite? According to the US State Department definition of anti-Semitism, they do.

Post-Election Incidents in the US

In the United States the number of incidents of harassment and intimidation has spiked sharply in the weeks following the election victory of Donald Trump. Spurred on by the hateful and divisive rhetoric of his campaign, many Americans have been emboldened to act on their racist, misogynistic and xenophobic sentiments. According to data supplied by the Southern Poverty Law Center, 867 such incidents were reported in the ten days following the election.[1]

While the large majority of these incidents were not serious enough to merit criminal investigation, they are nevertheless important to study, as their number is a barometer of the country’s attitudes.

No group seems to be immune to the Trump-fueled venom. While the plurality of the incidents has been directed at immigrants (32%), other groups have not emerged unscathed. Blacks (22%), Jews (12%), members of the LGBTQ community (11%), and Muslims (6%) have also been targeted.

The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act

On Thursday, December 1, the US Senate decided to act­­–but only to protect Jewish targets of hatred–by passing the so-called Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. Proposed by Senators Robert Casey and Tim Scott, both of whom have received substantial funding from pro-Israel lobby groups,[2] the legislation tackles anti-Semitism on university campuses. A statement on Casey’s website reads:

“It is incredibly important that we work together to stamp out anti-Semitism and other forms of religious discrimination across our country.”[3]

The senators claim that the Department of Education has been hampered in its efforts to combat anti-Semitism partly because it is lacking an understanding of what precisely constitutes anti-Semitism. The legislation attempts to rectify this problem by codifying the so-called State Department definition.

The State Department Definition of Anti-Semitism

On its website the State Department states that:

“Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”[4]

This definition is relatively standard and uncontroversial. However, the State Department ventures into dangerous territory by adding several paragraphs dealing with examples of anti-Semitism in relation to the state of Israel. It includes the so-called 3 D’s – demonizing Israel, double standards applied to Israel, and delegitimizing Israel.

The definition is similar to one that was adopted by the European Union Monitoring Centre (EMUC) following intensive Israeli lobbying efforts. It was, however, heavily criticized and subsequently discarded by the EMUC in 2013.

Conflating anti-Semitism with criticism of the State of Israel, is extremely problematic. Many nations, including the United States and Israel, sometimes engage in criminal or immoral behavior and need to be censured for it. The ability to criticize a state’s actions is a crucial and necessary element of any thriving democracy. In this country it is also protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Perhaps realizing the outrageousness of its definition, the State Department includes, seemingly as an after-thought, a short sentence at the very bottom of the page.

“However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.”

These considerations echo the sentiments of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who wrote in 2002 that “criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction — out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East — is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest.”[5]

Scholar Noam Chomsky disagrees with this assessment. Responding to a question about linking anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, he said that the former “is not a form of anti-Semitism. It’s simply criticism of the criminal actions of a state, period.”[6]

Anti-Semitism is clearly still a major problem in the United States and beyond. One can easily imagine that a true anti-Semite might find criticism of Israel to be a more socially acceptable outlet for his anti-Jewish feelings, but it is an enormous leap in logic to conclude the converse, that a critic of Israel must be an anti-Semite. But that is what the codification of the State Department definition of anti-Semitism does. The legislation seeks to punish those who seek to call Israel to account for its behavior on the assumption that it is a manifestation of anti-Semitism, when that can be far from being the case.

Why Now?

The reasons for the timing of the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act are clear. Opinion polls show that while most Americans still tend to sympathize much more with Israel than they do the Palestinians, the gap has become significantly smaller in recent times, especially after the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza, in which over 2,000 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians, including women and children, lost their lives.[7] Together with the recent successes of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement on university campuses and beyond, the trend has pro-Israeli forces extremely worried, especially about the hearts and minds of young Americans, who, according to the polls, exhibit greater pro-Palestinian tendencies. While Israel has taken the battle against BDS to state legislatures, where at least twenty-two states have passed or considered anti-BDS laws,[8] the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act is an offensive specifically aimed at the younger generation.

The Effects of the Bill

The legislation was passed unanimously by the Senate, and it is unclear what will happen if it is approved by the House of Representatives and signed into law by the president.

Palestine Legal, an organization devoted to protecting the rights of those who speak out on Palestinian issues in the US, states that criticism of Israel on campuses is protected under the First Amendment, and that the Department of Education has ruled in at least three separate cases to that effect.[9] But the law is a powerful deterrent, regardless of how effectively it can be used to prosecute offenders. What the lobby wants most is to stifle debate about Israel. The hope is that the fear of legal repercussions will prevent legitimate critics of Israel from raising their voices.

The election of Donald Trump has had many negative consequences for supporters of the Palestinian cause. In Palestine it has raised fears that Israeli authorities will agitate for the annexation of some parts of the West Bank, which would sound the death knell of a Palestinian state.[10] In the US the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) similarly has withdrawn its support for a Palestinian state, dropping language dealing with the two-state solution from its website.[11] Anti-BDS laws are being introduced in state legislatures, and now the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act is threatening to silence all criticism of Israel.

These are dangerous times on many fronts for all those who seek a fair solution for the Palestinians, and it is important that the battle for justice continue to be fought as vigilantly as ever in the face of these obstacles.

Here in Kabul, I’m generally an early riser at the home of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, but I’m seldom alone. Facing exams, my young friends awaken early and then stay up late to study. Before sunrise this morning, eighteen year old Ghulamai sits in the kitchen, poring over his textbook. His efforts have made him number one in his class for the past three school terms. Now in the eleventh grade, he greatly hopes to continue his education, but his situation is precarious.

After sunrise each day Ghulamai heads out on his bicycle to the one-room home that his mother shares with four of his siblings. His bicycle has a rack above the rear wheel with a pillow fixed to it by bungee cord. His mother perches here each day as he carries her for the twenty minutes it takes to reach the three-story building where she works. Six days a week, she cooks, cleans, and launders for three well-to-do families who live here. Ghulamai will return to fetch her in the late afternoon, bringing her back to their room where her children have been waiting for her. The oldest, eleven year old Jamila, looks after them while their mother is away.

Last week, Henrietta (Voices – UK), Ali and I visited Ghulamai with his mother and siblings in this room. Joining us in these snug quarters were two neighboring women and their small children. Ghulamai’s mother served tea to all of us as we sat together learning about the women’s experiences trying to survive in a country ravaged by war and corruption.

Ghulamai’s mother was desperate when she recently moved to Kabul from the more rural province of Bamiyan. Now, in Kabul, her earnings just barely cover rent and very simple meals for the family, but back home no amount of hard work washing other families’ clothes would earn enough for her family’s food and shelter. The cleaning work here is difficult, in no small part because one of her hands is badly mangled from a Russian air strike upon her own wedding. At the time, she was 11 years old. Shrapnel tore one of her fingers clear away, crippling her for life. Strikes at weddings and other civilian gatherings have continued under U.S. occupation, part of a daily traumatic onslaught permanently narrowing life choices for the most vulnerable people here, as war can be expected to do.

According to Brown University’s Watson Institute, approximately 111,000 people have been killed and an additional 116,000, at minimum, wounded during the 15-year U.S. war in Afghanistan. The death toll from poverty, malnutrition, disease, and social dislocation can’t easily be neatly calculated for such a study. Over 31,000 – nearly a third – of the people killed in fighting alone are local civilians. The United Nations Assistance Mission for Afghanistan (UNAMA) counts more than 40,900 Afghan civilian injuries since January 2009.

What has the war accomplished? In the U.S., it is hard for anyone to credit the lie that our rampage through the Middle East, begun in vengeance for the 9/11 attacks of 2001, has made anyone safer. In April 2016, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported to Congress only 70.5 percent of the country was in Afghan government control, and just three months later (July 30 2016), SIGAR noted that “the area under Afghan government control had declined by about 5 percent. Violence occurs even in the areas ‘controlled’ by the government.”

Today we met with Kubra, Latifah, Shekibah and Naima, four local seamstresses struggling to get by in alarmingly simple dwellings, and I mentioned that many in the U.S. believe the war has allowed the U.S. government to help and protect women in Afghanistan. All four women disagreed, insisting that any aid from outside Afghanistan goes to people who will never share it with the needy.

“The U.S. may help the Afghan government,” said Latifah, “but all we see are new, fancy buildings.” It is difficult to see how, in the chaos and desperation war creates, women’s lives could be expected to improve. Pious talk about Afghan women’s freedom often ignores their greatest desire which is to find food for their children. When all we in the U.S. share is talk, when we demand transformation of people’s lives but choose then to destructively transform their society with airdropped bombs and missiles, plus millions of rifles and bullets, then our most impassioned talk becomes ridiculous and hurtful.

The APVs help the seamstresses provide for their children by giving them rice, beans and cooking oil once a month, but the women say no one else helps them. Two of these women are married to men who are disabled and the other two say their husbands can’t find work anywhere. During part of the year, the women do paid seamstress work in the APV duvet project and the blue scarf project.

As part of the APV effort to help people facing hunger, cold and little to no income. Ghulamai now coordinates their Food Bank. This project provides the monthly food ration the seamstresses mentioned, chiefly to families enrolled in the APV’s “Street Kids School.” By offering a food ration, the APVs allow these families to forgo the income their children could earn as child street workers and instead send them to government schools for half the day, no longer sacrificing their futures to their immediate survival. It’s a fine project, and now some of the older street kids volunteer time on the APV’s other main project, “the Duvet Project,” through which women of no income can earn a wage sewing heavy blankets for distribution, free of charge, to families with little or no protection from the harsh winter.

Ghulamai once told me about an encounter he had with very young trash collectors who asked him if they could go through the trash bags he was wheeling to the local dump. He agreed, and they salvaged a few scraps of bread and some paper that could be used for fuel. Then they sat down to talk with him. Pointing to a large new home, of the type referred to as a “poppy palace” since opium plays such a great role in building new fortunes here, one of the children said, “Look at that castle and at how those people live, and see how we live.”

In a way the child is pointing at those of us who live in the relatively comfortable castles in the west. An impossible gap exists between our demands for infinite security and the nightmare precarity suffered in those countries from which our wars rip that security away. It cannot be sustained, and our shaky existence in this poppy palace can only end with our finally waking up. We cannot remain high above the poorest abroad or the poorest here at home. It’s much wiser to invoke the Golden Rule, to find satisfaction in living simply and sharing resources, and to become enlightened by truthful and altruistic youngsters who point us toward a better world.

]]>David Macarayhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889662016-12-08T21:16:08Z2016-12-09T08:53:35ZMore]]>It was announced that President-elect Donald Trump (how those four words still curdle in our throat!) will be appointing Andrew Puzder as his Secretary of Labor. Even though there is no real surprise in this appointment, let us count the ways that it should scare the bejeezus out of anyone who roots for the working class.

Firstly, Andrew Puzder is a deregulation fiend, a fanatic, who doesn’t believe in the salutary benefits of labor laws, whether they be municipal, county, state or federal. In a word, he views the overwhelming majority of labor laws (including the landmark National Labor Relations Act) as impediments to doing business.

As a consequence, he doesn’t believe it’s the federal government’s place to establish a “minimum wage” (like any other “free market” fundamentalist, he believes the marketplace should freely determine an employee’s rate of pay on a case by case basis), but if the feds insist on doing so, that figure should be no higher than $9 per hour, which amounts to $18,720 annually for someone working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year.

Secondly, as CEO of CKE Restaurants, which owns, among other things, the Carl’s Jr. hamburger chain, Andy Puzder opposes having fast-food workers and retail sales employees belong to labor unions. Considering that unions offer the triumvirate of better wages, better benefits, better working conditions, Andy’s opposition is solely profit-based. Indeed, it might be classified as the doctrine of a classic fiscal conservative. That or a “greedy bastard.”

This is unfortunate because fast-food workers and retail sales people (think of the employees of the mega- Wal-Mart corporation) are regarded by organized labor as the platform from which to launch the Second Wave of the labor movement. The First Wave was industrial; the Second Wave will be service oriented (health care and civil service jobs are already leading the charge).

Unlike vulnerable and outdated smoke-stack industries, restaurants and retail stores (of which there are many tens of thousands nationwide) aren’t “portable.” Which is to say, you can’t sell Carl’s Jr. hamburgers to customers in Peoria, Illinois, by relocating the restaurant to labor-cheap Bangladesh. This circumstance gives fast-food workers at least a modicum of leverage.

And thirdly, as Secretary of Labor, Andy Puzder will be the position to kick everyone’s butt, and to do it legally. As the highest ranking (both functionally and symbolically) labor figure in the U.S., he will not only set the tone for labor-management relations during a Trump presidency, he has the right to appoint three (a majority) of the five members of the NLRB.

This is a huge responsibility. Among other things, the NLRB is charged with adjudicating critical labor disputes—those involving the very definition of workers’ rights. For instance, when a labor union, or a group of employees seeking to be represented by that union, contacts the NLRB and accuses the company of using unfair or illegal tactics to keep the union out, it falls upon the Labor Board to make a ruling, and that decision is pretty much final.

Given Andrew Puzder’s virulently anti-union sentiments, and him pulling the strings while eating hamburgers, one can only imagine how rare it’s going to be for the Board to side with labor in any crucial dispute. As Bette Davis (playing Margo Channing) famously said, “Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

]]>Howard Lisnoffhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889412016-12-08T16:56:29Z2016-12-09T08:53:31ZMore]]>I interviewed Elisabeth Lareau nine days after the Congressional candidate we both worked for in upstate New York, Zephyr Teachout, a progressive Democrat, lost by over 9 percent to her conservative Republican opponent, John Faso, in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Teachout was one of the candidates Our Revolution supported and was endorsed by presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Elisabeth was a field organizer in the Teachout campaign. She was in charge of Teachout’s Hudson, New York campaign office. The office was a fairly hectic place in the final days of the campaign and had been functioning for about a month at the time of the November 8th election. The office was one of many similar campaign offices that spanned a fairly substantial geographical area that ran along the Hudson River north of New York City, then up through the rural counties of the state just below the I-90 corridor. We communicated one additional time about one month after the general election.

Elisabeth graduated in 2015 with a degree from the State University of New York system at New Paltz, New York with a major in international relations and a minor in economics. In many ways, she represents the politically charged student movement that catapulted Bernie Sanders to coming within striking distance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination. She volunteered for the Sanders’ campaign for two months before coming to the Teachout campaign. She reflects the concerns of students across the U.S. in many ways, having earned an excellent education while facing many of the pressing issues that have turned some of her student cohort into a politically charged and active base.

Typical campaign work during the life of the Hudson office involved volunteers working phone banks and completing door-to-door canvassing assignments with prospective voters. Data entry of the information gleaned from these campaign activities was also part of the function of the office.

Hudson, New York is a city well on its way to gentrification. Its main business district is occupied by restaurants, small retail shops, and many antique shops. It has a diverse population with a sizable number of gay and lesbian citizens and African-Americans. Much of its economy depends on people from out of town, who fill the city’s sidewalks and streets and frequent its shops.

What drew you to become active in progressive politics?

I have a strong sense of compassion. I was raised in an evangelical Christian home. It gave me a critical perspective of looking at the world and seeing that the world was not on track because of cruelty, callousness, and greed. I moved away from that religious perspective as I got older. I began learning about significant issues in world history such as the Holocaust and fascism. I saw how the exclusion of certain groups in society gave rise to social movements and I began to form opinions about mass movements like the civil rights movement.

In high school I was always the weirdo, but my opinions were supported by teachers and I excelled academically in advanced placement courses. I began my college experience at a community college and transferred to SUNY New Paltz, which was a very political campus. The program at New Paltz in international relations was a rigorous one and I was committed to doing well. The reading and writing course requirements in that program were very intensive. I was introduced to writers like Hannah Arendt and Friedrich Nietzsche and I wanted to develop a system that could refute Nietzsche’s argument against morality by creating a new philosophical foundation for ethical actions, especially how those actions would work in the real world of politics and society.

I envisioned the classroom as more of a forum where students would be excited by the exchange of ideas inspired by the course material, however, in many classes I got the impression that some of my peers were there simply to obtain class credits, or memorize material.

In economics classes, I learned the mechanisms by which currency had an effect on the stability of countries. I learned about the effects of globalization in the context of an uneven playing field. When borders are opened between labor intensive manufacturing and commodity-based economies, and developed countries with a lot of capital to invest, you get a race to the bottom. I theorized that developing countries would never catch up to their developed counterparts because as their production becomes increasingly technologically developed, it becomes more capital intensive. As this level of productive development, capital intensity reaches closer to that of the developed world, and the return on investment also approaches that of the developed world, eroding the investment advantages formerly experienced by very undeveloped countries potentially leading to bubble creation and consequently recession. In addition, developed countries initially operating at the technological frontier (of production) will tend to retain economic advantages. Accordingly, all boats certainly would not rise with the tide. Developing countries are never equal to the major economic powers and that has to be taken into account in the system of economic globalization that we now have.

I worked summers in the New York Public Interest Research Group, which, according to NYPIRG, “examines important issues, produces studies, and engages New Yorkers in public education campaigns designed to produce policies and strengthen democracy, enhance the right of consumers and voters, and protect the environment and public health.” Elisabeth most recently worked in NIPIRG’s Ithaca, New York office.

What do you think about the rise of student political consciousness around the 2016 elections?

I, along with millions of other students, was waiting for the election season. I was thrilled to learn about the Sanders’ campaign. I wanted to get involved immediately. I was in California when the deadline neared for declaring party affiliation for the April 2016 presidential primary in New York and I changed my affiliation so that I would be able to vote in the primary. Issues like income inequality that was moved to center stage in the Occupy Wall Street Movement was of prime importance. Understanding the financial crisis that became known as the Great Recession had a great effect of me and masses of other students. Bernie represented a no-bs perspective to the issues around income inequality and student debt and the lack of good jobs available for my generation.

Back on campus it had become hipper to be aware of issues such as the LGBT movement and all of these different movements for equality and social justice began to have an effect on students. We were already involved in many environmental, economic and social-justice issues, however, up until Bernie’s run there was no candidate to speak to our diverse concerns. It is in this sense that I think my generation was ‘just waiting” for a candidate like Bernie to put our efforts forward. Students knew the burden of the debt that they carried out of their school experience and the lack of good jobs commensurate with their education. Students knew what they faced, but it took a candidate like Sanders to give voice to those social issues. There was no mass movement before Sanders that could articulate their hopes and fears. I volunteered for Bernie the winter after I graduated. I would say that for a generation growing up through the Bush years, social justice and progressive issues had been growing in the popular consciousness for the last eight years.

Through our issues, we can connect with the global community so that we have a stronger sense of identity with people all over the world. The internet and immigration have lead to an increasing globalization of culture. More and more young people around the world share a sense of identity. We recognize that economic and environmental issues affect us all, and that everyone deserves human and civil rights. There is a emerging sense of solidarity, a willingness to act in concert for a common good that becomes more apparent especially in the face of global climate change. The first global crisis calls upon the first global generation.

Do you predict that student activism will continue beyond the 2016 election cycle?

Yes, activism will persevere. When you have people shot in the streets… when you can’t get decent jobs… when you come out of school with huge debt… You have no choice. The Black Lives Matter movement… the Sanders’ campaign… the pressing issue of climate change. People, and the young, feel that they have been abandoned by government. These are issues that will continue on into the next decade and beyond. They are not single issues and they must be coordinated through activism. The economic crisis, where high-skill levels are not being rewarded by high-paying jobs, creates a class dynamic. It brings the abstract differences between the 1% and the 99% into focus and into the real world. There will be stronger grassroots movements because of the contradictions inherent in issues like the tremendous burden of student debt and discrimination.

Can you talk about your work as a field organizer in the Zephyr Teachout campaign for Congress in New York?

It was very disappointing to have a person with Zephyr Teachout’s credentials, who could represent our progressive interests, lose. It was very frustrating. We believed that the top of the ticket would have a positive effect on what were called down-ticket candidates, but that is not how the campaign unfolded in this particular race for Congress. As in the rest of the country, we didn’t anticipate such a massive turnout for Trump. Many of those energized Republican voters came out for Trump and voted down-ticket. Yet no one who was intimately involved in Zephyr’s campaign has expressed resignation. It’s important to know that you were right and that by taking part in the process, you and others were not atomized, but acted in concert for good policies like bringing good jobs to the Hudson River Valley, continuing to clean up the environment of the Hudson River Valley, and supporting local farming. We were, and are, on the right side of history, especially with the issues of pollution and climate change. We know that civilization has a choice and the consequences for not acting to address climate change have the most dire consequences for us.

]]>Yves Englerhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889682016-12-08T21:20:14Z2016-12-09T08:52:54ZMore]]>Is “remembering the Nazi Holocaust and where anti-Semitism can lead” a good thing? Unfortunately, thanks to people who constantly cite this horrible genocide in order to justify the illegal, immoral and anti-human behaviour of the Israeli state, one must answer, “it depends”.

Drawing attention to the Nazi Holocaust and anti-Semitism in Canada today often reinforces, rather than undermines, oppression and discrimination. This perverse reality was on display at two recent events in Toronto.

At a semi-annual Ryerson Student Union meeting a Hillel member pushed a resolution calling on the union to promote Holocaust Education Week in conjunction with United Jewish Appeal-Toronto, which marked Israel’s 2014 slaughter in Gaza by adding $2.25 million to its annual aid to that wealthy country. The motion stated, “this week is not in dedication to anti-Zionist propaganda” and called for the Week to “focu[s] solely on the education of the Holocaust and not on other genocides.”

Objecting to this brazen attempt to use the decimation of European Jewry to protect an aggressive, apartheid state many students left the meeting. When quorum was lost before the vote pro-Israel activists cried — wait for it — “anti-Semitism”. “Tonight I experienced true and evil anti-Semitism”, complained Tamar Lyons, vice president of communications for Students Supporting Israel at Ryerson University, in a racist social media post republished by B’nai B’rith. In it the StandWithUs Emerson Fellow, which trains university students to advance Israel’s interests, bemoaned how “a Muslim student ‘goy-splained’ me”.

After the meeting Lyons linked the purported anti-Jewish incident to the Ryerson Student Union endorsing the BDS movement two years earlier. She told the Canadian Jewish News it was “a direct result of [the] boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and the anti-Israel sentiment that’s so prevalent on campus.”

Taking place on the eve of an Ontario legislature vote to condemn BDS activism, the national director of B’nai Brith jumped on the Ryerson affair. “What starts with BDS does not end with BDS,” said Amanda Hohmann. “More often than not, BDS is simply a gateway drug to more blatant forms of antisemitism.”

(Yup, take a toke of that leftist–internationalist ‘pressure Israel to follow international law’ bud and soon you’re longing for some Neo-Nazi ‘get-the-Jews’ smack.)

As B’nai B’rith hyped the Ryerson affair, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs pushed the Ontario legislature to pass a motion in support of the spurious “Ottawa Protocol on Combating Anti-Semitism” and to reject “the differential treatment of Israel, including the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.” Passed 49 to 5 (with 53 absent), motion sponsor Gila Martow told the legislature: “We would not be here supporting the Ku Klux Klan on our campuses, so why are we allowing [the] BDS movement and other anti-Jewish and anti-Israel organizations to have demonstrations and use our campuses, which are taxpayer-funded?”

In an interview with the Toronto Sun after the vote the Thornhill MPP described BDS as “psychological terrorism on the campuses … The motive behind BDS is to hurt the Jewish community by attacking Israel.”

The only MPP who spoke against the motion was the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh. But, even this defender of the right to criticize Israel spent much of his speech talking about how anti-Semitism “must be denounced.”

Notwithstanding the anti-Semitism hullabaloo, the BDS vote and Ryerson affair have little to do with combating anti-Jewishness. As is obvious to anybody who thinks about it for a second, comparing internationalist and social justice minded individuals to the KKK will elicit, not lessen, anti-Jewish animus. Similarly, labeling a nonviolent movement “psychological terrorism” and writing about “Muslim … goy-splaining” isn’t likely to endear Jewish groups to those concerned with Palestinian dispossession and building a just world.

The major Jewish organizations and trained Israeli nationalist activists scream “anti-Semitism” to protect Israel from censure, of course. But they also do so because few are willing to challenge them on it. As such, the “anti-Semitism” smears should be seen as a simple assertion of CIJA and B’nai B’rith’s political, economic and cultural clout.

Possibly the best placed of any in the world, the Toronto Jewish community faces almost no discernable economic, social or cultural discrimination. Describing it as “the envy of the UJA federation world”, Alan Dershowitz told its 2014 Toronto Major Gifts dinner: “You must never be ashamed to use your power and strength. Never be afraid that people will say, ‘You’re too strong and powerful.’ Jews need power and strength. Without this strength – economically, morally, militarily – we can’t have peace.”

The Ryerson affair and vote at the provincial legislature reflect a Toronto Jewish establishment drunk with its power. But the sober reality of constantly justifying oppression by citing the Holocaust/anti-Semitism is that it undermines the power of that memory and is an insult to all those who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis.

]]>Adam Parsonshttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889442016-12-08T17:01:32Z2016-12-09T08:50:58ZMore]]>As 2016 draws to a close, we appear to be living in a world that is increasingly defined by its illusions, where the truth is a matter of subjective interpretation or argumentative debate. Indeed, following the United States election and Brexit referendum there is much talk of a new era of post-truth politics, in which appeals to emotion count more than verifiable facts. But there are some facts that cannot be ignored for much longer, however hard we may try. And the greatest of all these facts is the escalating climate emergency that neither mainstream politicians, nor the public at large, are anywhere near to confronting on the urgent scale needed.

This was brought home once again at the latest Conference of the Parties held in Morocco last month, following the so-called ‘historic’ Paris Agreement of November 2015. Dubbed the ‘implementation’ or ‘action COP’, the main purpose of the summit was to agree the rules for implementing the new agreement, as few countries have set out concrete plans for how they will achieve future emissions reductions post-2020. Far from justifying its nickname, however, the almost 200 nations participating in COP22 decided that the overarching goals and framework for international climate action will not be completed until 2018, with a mere review of progress in 2017.

Before the talks even commenced, the latest ‘emissions gap’ report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) highlighted the continued divergence between political and environmental/scientific reality. According to UNEP’s analysis, the non-binding pledges made by governments in Paris could see temperatures rise by 3.4°C above pre-industrial levels this century, far beyond the 2°C considered a minimally safe upper limit. To hit the more realistic 1.5°C target—which in itself will only mitigate, rather than eliminate severe climate impacts—the world must dramatically step up its ambition within the next few years before we use up the remaining carbon budget.

Yet this reality was not even a key focus of the COP22 discussions, where most delegates from developed countries spoke mainly of their post-2020 commitments, as if the deadline for an emergency mobilisation of effort can be postponed by another few years. Ironically, several developed countries have not even ratified the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, which comprises the pre-2020 period. So after 24 years of negotiations, we are still heading towards a future that is “incompatible with an organised global community”, with no sign that the mismatch between rhetoric and action is near to closing.

As always, it was left to civil society groups to uphold the real hope and vision for how nations can begin traversing a path towards 1.5°C. In an updated report for COP22, a coalition of campaigning organisations outlined the last chance we have of halting our race to environmental disaster, which will require massive emissions reductions before 2020 and major shifts in the real economy. All of these transformations are technically viable and economically practicable, despite their apparent political infeasibility—such as a fossil energy investment and development moratorium; a necessary shift to agro-ecological farming practices; and a planned global transition to 100% renewable energy.

What remains central to achieving an effective programme of action, however, is a degree of international cooperation and economic sharing that is unprecedented in human history. Such is the implicit message of both the 2016 and 2015 civil society equity reviews, which give a compelling justification for integrating the principle of ‘fair shares’ into a global effort-sharing framework. Using an equity modelling approach based on domestic mitigation pledges and indicators for capacity and historical responsibility, the reports show how developed countries are offering a share of effort that is markedly less ambitious than developing countries.

Moreover, both reports demonstrate how developed countries have fair share obligations that are too large to be fulfilled solely within their own borders, even with extremely ambitious domestic actions. So there is a moral, political and economic case for the wealthiest nations to vastly scale up their help to poorer countries in terms of international finance, technology sharing, and capacity-building support.

Put simply, campaigning organisations have used the most up-to-date scientific data to back up the argument that there cannot be hope for limiting global warming unless the principles of sharing, justice and equity are operationalised in a multilateral climate regime. But it is also an argument based on common sense and fundamental notions of fairness, given the urgency of drastically cutting global emissions within the context of interdependent nations at starkly disparate levels of economic and material development. As the civil society review for COP22 concludes, reiterating a basic truth of the climate justice movement: “Many of the changes needed to address the climate crisis are also needed to create a fairer world and better lives for us all. …Climate change affirms the urgency and necessity to shift to an equitable and just pathway of development.”

Of course, there is no sign that those countries with a higher capacity to act than others are facing up to their obligations to redistribute massive technological and financial resources to developing countries, thus enabling them to leapfrog onto rapid, low-carbon development paths. Activists at COP22 used the slogan “WTF?” to ask “Where’s The Finance?”, as only between $18 billion and $34 billion has been granted of the $100 billion per year that developed countries committed to find by 2020. A supposed “$100 Billion Roadmap” from the OECD was roundly debunked by both developing countries and civil society for using misleading numbers and various accounting tricks. All the while, new analysis shows that the true needs of the world’s poorest countries is in the realm of trillions of dollars, if they are to plausibly meet their Paris pledges by 2030 and help avoid catastrophic warming. But no increases in public financial contributions were forthcoming in Morocco, pushing any substantive decisions on the issue back for another two years.

So once again, we are left to wonder at the mismatch between illusive policymaking and the stark reality of global warming. 2016 broke all previous records for being the hottest year, while military leaders warned that climate change is already the greatest security threat of the 21st century, potentially leading to refugee problems on an unimaginable scale. Yet developed countries continue to evade and postpone their responsibilities for mobilising an appropriate response, while often making decisions on national infrastructure and energy that directly contradict their putative climate change commitments. Whether or not the United States withdraws from the Paris accords or the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) altogether, the prospect of global carbon emissions beginning to decline before 2020 currently remains dim, to say the least.

Still none of this changes the core reality, which has remained the same ever since the UNFCCC negotiations began in the early 1990s. For there can be no hope of real and meaningful progress on tackling climate change, without a major commitment to North-South cooperation based upon a fairer sharing of global resources. The simple truth is unavoidable, but time is running out before the world finally embraces its momentous implications.

]]>Brian Cloughleyhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889242016-12-07T22:25:04Z2016-12-09T08:50:57ZMore]]>It is sad to have to have to acknowledge that the country of one’s birth is in decline, but there are signs that Great Britain has fallen on the slippery slope of moral deterioration. The recent surge in nationalistic jingoism and xenophobia in Britain is lamentable and obnoxious.

In October the British Home Office reported that the number of racist hate crimes in the country had increased by 41 per cent in the month after the June referendum about UK’s membership of the European Union, the so-called ‘Brexit’ vote. The Equality and Human Rights Commission noted that “the figures make it very clear that some people used the referendum result to justify their deplorable views and promote intolerance and hatred” and there were other expressions of regret and revulsion — but not from many of the mainstream media outlets, because several newspapers rejoiced in the rush of intolerance that they had done so much to encourage.

The reasons for lack of regret, alas, are that many Britons are inherently racist and most of the print media play on that appalling aspect of the British character in order to attract readers and make money. In the facile and attractive guise of patriotism the papers seize on instances of supposed non-Britishness to encourage their readers to engage in hatred and contempt of foreigners. It is unlikely that any writers of such fascist hokum are familiar with the works of one of the greatest English essayists, poets and moralists, Dr Samuel Johnson, who wrote so perceptively that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

Britain has had a race problem for many years but of late it has become severe because of a spiteful nationalistic campaign to leave the European Union, an organization that is bureaucratically absurd but seeks to benefit Europe’s citizens by promoting free trade and freedom of movement, protecting human rights, encouraging harmonization of legal processes, increasing effectiveness of counter-terrorism cooperation, and promoting economic and social progress.

These objectives are considered abhorrent by a surprising number of Britons who believe that alliance with the other 27 nations of the European Union helps movement of undesirable people to their country and that European legal covenants, agreed by their own governments during the past forty years, are inimical to the British way of life. They claim that leaving the European Union will save vast sums of money, especially in health care, while preventing abuse of ‘British Law’ by continuing to abide by European human rights standards.

It is the contention of those who wish to leave the European Union that future trading arrangements to be negotiated at an unknown date with potential but unnamed countries will be of more financial benefit than continuance of existing European Union agreements with current trading partners. (The hastily-arranged November trade-promotion visit to India by Prime Minister Theresa May — a civilised person — was sadly barren. As reported by India’s Financial Express, she returned ‘Empty-Handed.’)

The seeming rise in anti-European fervour was taken into political account by former Prime Minister David Cameron who announced in February 2016 that a referendum would be held in June to ask the simple question: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” It was made clear that the referendum result would not in any way oblige the country to leave the European Union, because the Parliament did not specify legal consequences of a vote either way. It was an “advisory referendum”, and the British Parliament was and is in no way bound by any law or precedent to accept the result as mandatory for the country to ‘Brexit.’

It was intended that the referendum result would be an expression of the non-binding feelings of the British people and that the elected members of Parliament would take due notice of this when debating the complex matter in due course.

There are 46,501,241 people of voting age in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Of these, 17,410,742 voted to leave the European Union. Another 16,141,241 voted to remain within the European Union. Let me repeat that in a plebiscite of 46 million people, 17 million — 37 per cent — voted to leave the EU and that their choice was in no manner or by any interpretation of law an instruction to the government to do so.

The laws of Great Britain are determined by its members of Parliament. Many of both may be stupid, but no matter : Parliament is sovereign and its decisions are binding. Some of those who objected to the stance that the country should immediately leave the Union without Parliament discussing the matter took the matter to the High Court where three distinguished judges ruled that Parliament must vote on whether the country can begin the process.

Then Britain’s media sprang into action. The Daily Mail, whose editor, a foul-mouthed vulgarian called Paul Dacre, received “£88,000 in subsidies from the European Union for his country houses in Sussex and the Scottish Highlands in 2014” ordered his minions to produce one of the most disgusting front pages in the long history of British journalism. It depicted the three judges with the banner caption ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE.

Even more despicably, the newspaper emphasised that one of the people who brought the High Court action was a coloured citizen of Britain (who was sent threats of rape and murder for her actions), and one of the judges was “openly gay.” It declared that two of the judges had sat on the European court of human rights, one being ‘fluent in several languages’ and the other ‘steeped in EU laws and tradition.’ One of them — shock, horror! — had ‘worked for a Hamburg law firm shortly after leaving Oxford.’

These spiteful, malevolent and thus most effective tirades were straight out of 1930s Germany, and there was not a shred of criticism of the newspapers by the government.

Other garbage newspapers, such as the formerly admirable Daily Telegraph, carried headlines such as ‘The Judges Versus The People.’ The Mailremoved one abusive headline from its vulgar website, but the damage had been done and the bigots of Britain had been given yet more backing to express their hatred of foreigners, which extends to the media’s relentless anti-Russia campaign, intended to portray President Putin and the Russian people in the worst possible light.

One declaration of President Barack Obama that will be remembered is his wise warning that in the United States “we are going to have to guard against a rise in a crude sort of nationalism, or ethnic identity or tribalism that is built around an US and a THEM.”

In Trump America it is possible that this crude nationalism might become dominant. But in Britain it seems it already rules, as those judged (no irony intended) to be ‘different’ in any way to native Anglo-Saxons are considered to be undesirable. This has been so for very many years, unfortunately, and, as recollected by one young person so affected in the 1960s, it was insulting, when looking for lodgings, to “find notices galore that said ‘No Irish, no coloureds’.”

Although repulsive racist prejudice and casual bigotry are far from new in the United Kingdom, it had been thought that in the New Millennium there might have been some advance towards tolerance and acceptance of minorities. The Race Relations Act was supposed to eradicate racism, and had some mild success, but its aims have been set back or even destroyed by the bigots of Brexit who won their dubious victory largely because they appealed to all that is most base in mankind : the idea that superiority depends on race and especially color.

The country is declining. At this rate, the fall won’t be long in coming.

A version of this piece appeared in Strategic Culture Foundation on November 28.

]]>Eamonn Fingletonhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889622016-12-08T21:14:19Z2016-12-09T08:50:53ZMore]]>Trust mainstream media commentators to get their priorities right! While they dished out hell to Donald Trump the other day over his 10-minute conversation with the president of Taiwan, they could hardly have been more supportive all these years of a rather more consequential American affront to mainland China: Barack Obama’s so-called “pivot” to Asia.

As the London-based journalist John Pilger points out, the absurdly named pivot, which has been a central feature of U.S. foreign policy since 2012, is clearly intended to tighten America’s military containment of the Middle Kingdom. In Pilger’s words, Washington’s nuclear bases amount to a hangman’s noose around China’s neck.

Pilger makes the point in a searing new documentary, “The Coming War on China.” Little known in the United States, Pilger has been a marquee name in British journalism since the 1960s. First as a roving reporter for the Daily Mirror and later as a television documentary maker, he has spent more than fifty years exposing the underside of American foreign policy – and very often, given London’s predilection to play Tonto to Washington’s Lone Ranger, that has meant exposing the underside of British foreign policy also.

Pilger built his early reputation on opposition to the Vietnam war; more recently he emerged as a scathing critic of the Bush-Blair rush to invade Iraq after 9/11.

In his latest movie, Pilger, a 77-year-old Australian, argues that the “pivot” sets the world up for nuclear Armageddon. The Obama White House probably disagrees; but, not for the first time, Pilger is asking the right questions.

This is not to suggest that Washington doesn’t have legitimate issues. But its China strategy is upside down. While it rarely misses an opportunity to lord it over Beijing militarily, its economic policy in the face of increasingly outrageous Chinese provocation could hardly be more spineless. Instead of insisting that China honor its WTO obligations, U.S. policymakers have looked the other way as Beijing has not only maintained high trade barriers against American exports but, far worse, has contrived to force the transfer of much of what is left of America’s once awe-inspiring reservoir of world-beating manufacturing technologies.

In the case of the auto industry, for instance, Beijing’s proposition goes like this: “We’d love to buy American cars. But those cars must be made in China – and the Detroit companies must bring their best manufacturing technologies.” Such technologies then have a habit of migrating rapidly to rising Chinese rivals.

By indulging China economically and provoking it militarily, the Obama administration would appear to be schizoid. But this is to judge things from a commonsensical outsider’s perspective – always a mistake in a place as inbred and smug as Washington. Seen from inside the Beltway, everything looks perfectly rational. Whether Washington is giving away the U.S. industrial base, on the one hand or arming to the teeth against a putative Chinese bogeyman on the other, the dynamic is the same: lobbying money.

As the U.S. industrial base has been shipped machine-by-machine, and job-by-job, to China, America’s ability to pay its way in the world has correspondingly imploded. Although rarely mentioned in the press (does the American press even understand such elementary and obvious economic consequences?), this means America has become ever more dependent on other nations to fund its trade deficits. The funding comes mainly in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds. And guess who is the biggest buyer? The Communist regime in Beijing, of course. In effect, the bemused Chinese are paying for the privilege of having nukes pointed at them!

That is not a sustainable situation. Beijing no doubt has a plan. Washington, tone-deaf as always in foreign affairs, has not yet discovered there is a problem. We have been fated to live in interesting times.

Pilger’s documentary will air in the United States on RT on December 9, 10, and 11. For details click here.

Eamonn Fingleton is the author of In the Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008).

]]>Graham Peebleshttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889572016-12-08T18:21:51Z2016-12-09T08:50:47ZMore]]>The man-made environmental catastrophe is the severest issue facing humanity. It should be the number one priority for governments, but despite repeated calls from scientists, environmental groups and concerned citizens for years, short-term policies and economic self-interest are consistently given priority over the integrity of the planet and the health of the population.

Environmental inequality

Contaminated air is the world’s greatest preventable environmental health risk, and, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), is responsible for the premature deaths of an estimated 6.5 million people annually (11.6% of global deaths) – an average of six every minute. And unless there is substantial reduction in the quantity of pollutants cast into the atmosphere, the death count is forecast to double by 2050. Indoor air pollution, mainly from wood or dung stoves in developing countries, accounts for a staggering three million annual deaths.

Breathing – even in one’s own home – has become more dangerous than poor diet, lack of exercise or smoking tobacco.

The problem of toxic air is a worldwide pandemic; a recent WHO air quality model reveals that, “92% of the world’s population lives in places where air quality levels exceed WHO limits”. And whilst contaminated air affects virtually everyone, almost two out of three people killed simply by breathing live in South-East Asia and the Western Pacific. This includes China, where air pollution is responsible for the deaths of around 4,000 people a day (1.6 million a year), due, a 2015 study says, to emissions generated from burning coal, for electricity and heating homes.

Humanity is overwhelmingly responsible for this global crisis, and yet despite repeated warnings little of substance has been done and it’s getting worse. Since 2011 air pollution worldwide has risen 8%, and with the current fossil fuel obsession the increase looks set to continue, and with it human fatalities and a range of chronic health issues. Most deaths are caused by microscopic particles being inhaled: these spark heart attacks and strokes, which account for 75% of annual deaths. Lung cancer and respiratory diseases take care of the rest.

Perhaps unsurprisingly it is the poorest people in the world who suffer the most severe effects of air pollution.

As well as the injustice of social and economic inequality, we live in a world of environmental inequality. If you are a poor child living in a city in a developing country, you are up to 10 times more likely to suffer long-term health issues as a result of breathing the air in which you live, than a child in a rich industrialized nation.

Regional air inequality broadly follows the same North-South hemisphere fault lines as economic inequality, and as such reveals that as well as being a global environmental issue of the utmost importance, air pollution is a geo-political matter aggravated by the neo-liberal economic system. Some of the poorest, most vulnerable members of humanity are suffering the worst effects of air pollution, people living in countries where grinding poverty is widespread, education inadequate and health care provision poor.

Poisonous air

Air pollution causes a wide range of health issues: in addition to heart disease and respiratory conditions including asthma – now the most common chronic disease in children – there is “substantial evidence concerning the adverse effects of air pollution on pregnancy outcomes and infant death”, according to research by the Medical University of Silesia in Warsaw, Poland. And, as if all this weren’t bad enough, in 2013 WHO concluded that outdoor air pollution is carcinogenic, i.e. it causes cancer.

The main pollutants that trigger all these problems are broadly three types: fine particulate matter (PM2.5), Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), which is a suffocating gas, and ground level ozone. PM2.5 come from road traffic exhaust fumes and burning fuels such as wood, heating oil or coal – as well as natural phenomenon such as volcanic eruptions. PM concentrations in the air vary depending on temperature and wind speed; they particularly like cold, still conditions, which allow them to aggregate. NO2, Plume Labs relates, “comes from combustion – heating, electricity generation, (vehicle and boat engines), 50% of NO2 emissions are due to traffic.” Ground level ozone is a major component of smog and is produced when “oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) – from motor vehicle exhaust and industrial emissions, power plants, gasoline vapors, and chemical solvents – interact with sunlight.”

The way in which these poisons are produced varies somewhat from country to country, but they abound in all densely populated, built up areas, where there are large numbers of motor vehicles, as well as coal-fired power plants and refineries. Emissions from residential energy use, prevalent in India and China, Nature Magazine reports, “have the largest impact on premature mortality globally.” In eastern USA, Europe, Russia and East Asia a remarkably high number of illnesses and fatalities result from air pollution caused by agricultural emissions, mainly nitrous oxide and methane.

Children worst hit

Over 50% of the world’s population now live in cities; by 2030 this figure is expected to rise to 65%. All cities suffer from traffic congestion and all are polluted, some more, some less. The Asian mega-cities are the most contaminated, and perhaps unsurprisingly the cities of India and Pakistan are the worst, filling the top seven positions of conurbations with the highest level of PM2.5 in the world. The Indian capital (25 million population) comes in first; incidentally it’s also the noisiest place to live on the planet.

In an unprecedented study of 11,000 schoolchildren from 36 schools in Delhi, it was found that over half the children had irreversible lung damage: in addition “about 15% complained of frequent eye irritation, 27.4% of frequent headaches, 11.2% of nausea, 7.2% of palpitation and 12.9% of fatigue.” And consistent with research in Poland, it was revealed that the children’s mental health was also impacted, with large numbers suffering attention deficit and stress.

All around the world people are suffering from the impact of toxic air: in Mumbai, simply breathing on the chaotic streets is equivalent to smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day; deaths increase six-fold on heavily polluted hot days in Athens, and mega-Mexico City – one of the world’s most polluted cities – has recently been branded a ‘hardship post’ for diplomats due to unhealthy air. In Nairobi, Kenya, pollution levels are between five and 10 times WHO recommended levels – worst in the slums, home to up to three million people.

London is one of the more polluted cities in Europe, cleaner than Paris and Milan, but dirtier than Berlin and Oslo. Almost 10,000 people die each year in the city from long-term exposure to air pollution, which is now considered Britain’s most lethal environmental risk killing around 40,000 people a year.

And in America, according to a study by the American Lung Association, over 50% of the population is exposed to air pollution toxic enough to cause health problems, with Los Angeles topping the list of places to avoid.

No matter where air pollution occurs, it’s children who are the most vulnerable. This, UNICEF relates, “is because they breathe more rapidly than adults and the cell layer in their lungs is more permeable to pollutant particles.” Research by the children’s agency found that three hundred million children live in areas of South and East Asia where toxic fumes are more than six times international guidelines; another 520 million children living in Sub-Saharan Africa are exposed to air pollution levels above the WHO limit. These toxic fumes cause “enduring damage to health and the development of children’s brain”, and contributed to “600,000 child deaths a year” – more than are caused by malaria and HIV/Aids combined.

Air pollution not only results in long-term health issues, it impedes a child’s cognitive development, affecting concentration and academic progress. The Warsaw paper states that “children who live in neighbourhoods with serious air pollution problems…have lower IQ and score worse in memory tests than children from cleaner environments…The effects were roughly equivalent to those seen in children whose mothers smoked ten cigarettes per day while pregnant.”

Air pollution and deforestation

Some air pollution is the result of natural phenomena: dust storms and wildfires, animal digestion and volcanic eruptions.

Deforestation is another cause. The great rainforests of the Earth are its lungs; they cover a mere 6% of the land, but produce around 40% of the world’s Oxygen; they also capture carbon. As the number of trees is reduced so oxygen production and carbon sequestration is diminished.

Whilst it’s true that deforestation has decreased somewhat over the last fifteen years or so, in some countries it is still occurring at an alarming rate. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimate that 18 million acres (7.3 million hectares) of forest are lost each year (roughly equivalent to 20 football fields every minute), around 13 million acres (approximately the size of Greece) being tropical rainforest. Half the world’s rainforests have already been wiped out and if the current level of destruction continues, in 100 years, FAO predicts, there will be none left. Brazil, Thailand, the Congo, parts of Eastern Europe and Indonesia are where forests are being cleared most intensely, particularly Indonesia.

The major reason forests are being destroyed is to make more land available for agriculture, which is an effect of overpopulation. Clearing land to make way for housing and urbanization. (another demand of population growth), is a factor, as is Illegal deforestation – with trees being cut down and used for fuel.

Paper production is another major reason; paper that is overwhelmingly used in developed countries. Up to half the world’s timber and 70% of paper is consumed by Europe, Japan and the US. The US alone, with only 5% of the world’s population, uses 30% of all paper, relates Rainforest Action Network; a large amount of which (estimated 40lbs/19 kilos per adult per year) is junk mail, almost half of which is binned unopened.

Reduce Reuse Recycle

If we are to stop the deaths and damaging health effects resulting from breathing contaminated air, it is abundantly clear that we need to replace fossil fuels with cleaner, renewable energy sources and simplify the way we live.

In addition there are a variety of things that can be done to reduce pollutants: we need to stop the destruction of forests worldwide; install filters in every chimneystack; replace petrol and diesel powered public transport and incentivize private ownership of electric and hydrogen vehicles; create more vehicle sharing schemes – car clubs and carpools; improve public transportation and greatly reduce fares; encourage cycling.

Some steps need to be taken by governments, but a great deal can be achieved by individuals accepting greater social/environmental responsibility: a move towards simpler modes of living, in which our lives are not driven by the insatiable urge for material goods, is essential. Incorporating the three R’s into one’s life – reduce reuse recycle – would contribute greatly.

Like many of our problems sharing has a role to play in solving the problem of air pollution: sharing the resources and wealth of the world equitably to reduce poverty and inequality, as well as sharing skills, knowledge, and technologies. And information sharing: making information about air pollution, the levels, risks, causes etc., publicly available, would further raise awareness of an invisible issue. This is particularly needed in developing countries, where many of those affected have little or no information on the dire health risks. Government agencies everywhere collect data on air pollution, some publish it, many don’t all should.

“The magnitude of the danger air pollution poses is enormous,” states Anthony Lake, UNICEF’s executive director. “No society can afford to ignore air pollution”. It is a deadly issue, which is causing untold suffering to millions of people. The responsibility for the wellbeing of the planet and of one another rests with all of us. Now is the time to act and Save our Planet.

“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.”

— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981

We all know that there is no authority in the freewheeling cyberspace in which we all communicate. No one speaks ex cathedra, or, more precisely, if they do, no one credits what they say as anything more than their opinion. Nevertheless, there was a beginning or slow emergence of our millennial disrespect for truth checkmating our own self-authorizing views. In A Postmodern Reader, which I edited with Linda Hutcheon in 1993, and my own A Primer to Postmodernity, 1997, both emerging from courses on postmodern culture at the beginning of the `90s, I had a ready to hand answer for the always asked question: “How then can you tell the difference between a fake story and a real one if, as you say, all we have are stories of the truth?”

My answer had two parts. In one view, begun in the Enlightenment, stories which comply to determining conditions of reality have staying power and those that don’t fade away, or are disproved by empirical or rational methods. We can more easily, Karl Popper tells us, reveal the false than the true. In another view, hierarchies of values and meanings commonly shared at a particular time privilege certain truth stories as truth and others as false. A continuous contesting of truth stories or narratives goes on with varying levels of heat out of which a story emerges as more real and true than the others. That confirmation goes on until it suddenly or slowly loses such confirmation. That black African slaves had no souls was a true story until it became a fake story. And so on.

Some fifteen years later, I see that the skeptical disposition toward truth and authority as well as words and their presumed trustworthy connection to the world need only have a noisy mayfly existence and yet do lasting damage to the fragile frame upon which the “general Welfare” rests. But beyond this is a crucial miscalculation as to how our subjectivities always enwrapped in a world we yet see as outside ourselves could find encouragement and confirmation of that separation, of a thoroughly detached and dominating subjectivity, in an alter-world — a cyberspace, online world.

That challenging alternative universe in which our subjectivities could roam had not “back in the day” established itself as a “society,” one endlessly divided and home to an equal number of voices establishing a new media broadcasting those voices. Subjectivities had not only found a “world” they could shape, a bespoke reality, but a place where they could voice, often in 140 characters, what was unchallenged within their personally designed realities.

I had no way of knowing nor could I imagine an entire culture would so quickly cast aside the tradition of truth, reality, objectivity, and rationality, disarming itself from any determination of fake and true commonly shared. It seemed that in one fantastical leap in the American mass psyche everyone now skeptically and angrily rejected the methods and institutions authorizing and authorized by reason and reality. This mass psyche is now losing itself in endless battles of words unmoored from any commonly shared apprehension of “conditions of the real.” What could be mutually perceived has given way to uncontested affirmations of “the world as it appears to me.” It is a triumph of the phenomenal witnessed repeatedly in individuals but rarely in an entire culture.

The chap who fired an automatic weapon in a pizzeria in an effort to rescue young girls caught in Hillary Clinton’s sex slave operation had come to the Truth of all that on a website. He is, you might say, a recent spawn of President-elect Trump’s own breezy replacement of fact and evidence as to what is true with both lies and bullshit. Lies, according to philosopher, Harry Frankfurt, indicate knowledge of the truth and a decision to stand it on its head. Bullshit is free of both truth and falsehood, the bullshitter unconcerned and ignorant of both but spinning a story nonetheless. There’s a mighty arrogance here and in Trump’s case it has proven to be magnetic and charismatic. Trump seems to be more of a bullshitter than a liar, his narcissism indifferent to what remains outside, true or false, of his own mind.

“Fake news is subjective” another chap interviewed in The New York Times tells us. “There’s no way for me to know what is objectively true, so we’ll stick to our guns and our own evidence. We’ll ignore the facts because nobody knows what’s really true anyway.” (Sabrina Tavernise, “As Fake News Spreads Lies, More Readers Shrug at Truth,” (Dec. 7, 2016). This all amounts to a very sad situation. The scientific method is still around; empirical and rational methodologies are still around. And yet we are now have suddenly stuck our head through a curtain, like John Bunyan’s pilgrim, and see nothing sacred or reliable beyond our own subjective responses, as if an objective world we could all rationally determine had vanished and what we now see are conspiracies of truth manipulation supported by equally spurious facts and evidence. Much of this fragmentation of truth and the methods and words that reveal it have been bred and nurtured in cyberspace where everything indiscriminately finds a place. A great democratization not unlike the chaos of an abyss.

Kant spoke of noumenal and phenomenal realities, reality impervious to our subjective experiencing of it and reality as we subjectively perceive it. It seems clear that at this millennial moment, we have lost any awareness of or concern for what lies outside our phenomenal realities. This state of affairs is having a troubling effect on established journalism, from the Wall Street Journal in one camp and The New York Times in the other. Political affiliation doesn’t matter when both are viewed as offering conspiratorial reportage. And yet politics is precisely the point at which we must observe to what our phenomenal realities have brought us. It remains a hyperreal through which we nonetheless must find our way to a mutually shared perception of a reality that “promotes the general Welfare.”

What is fake is not a subjective determination but rather a subjectivity detached from and undetermined by a “worlding” in which we are all invested is a fake story.

]]>Andre Vltchekhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889532016-12-08T18:00:23Z2016-12-09T08:50:07ZMore]]>There is a sense of change in those narrow and desperate alleys of the Baseco slum in the Philippines’ capital Manila. For the first time in many years a beautiful, noble lady visited; against all odds she decided to stay. Her name is Hope.

Baseco is a tough, crime-ridden region built from cartons and metal sheets, even rusty containers; everything is thrown together in startling fashion, right near the shipyard.

Here, the lips of the people used to be sealed, expressions on their faces incessantly desperate. Now everyone speaks, some even smile shyly, adults and children, women who look sixty at the age of thirty, as well as tough looking men.

“I support Duterte!” declares Ms. Imelda Rodriguez, who works as a physiotherapist here, through the Department of Social Welfare and Development. “Now children get free education and ‘medical missions’ provide basic medical care. We also receive allowances, and the government provides jobs. We are still lacking electricity, but at least the municipality is providing free drinking water.”

Nearby a teenage girl is washing her hair, using a bucket full of soapy water. It is raining and mud is everywhere. Children are running around barefoot, and some are obviously suffering from malnutrition.

“So much has to be done,” concludes Ms. Imelda. “But so much had been done already.”

People complain about an extremely high crime rate, about drug-pushing gangs. I visit the slums and vast cemeteries inhabited by the poorest of the poor; I also speak to people in shopping malls and at the office towers.

At the South Cemetery, Mr. Rex, a security guard, explains: “President Duterte is strict on the implementation of the rules. Crime is now going down dramatically.”

Self-proclaimed socialist ‘Presidente’ Rodrigo Duterte is enjoying the staggering support of his people, estimated to be well over 70 percent of the population.

“He reads a lot. He was greatly influenced by Hugo Chavez”, explains Roland Simbulan, Professor at the University of the Philippines in Manila. “He is strongly critical of the Western imperialism in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and of course in his country… He is outraged by how the West is treating refugees from the countries it destabilized in the Middle East. He is offering to accept them, to welcome them in the Philippines.”

Duterte has acquired a reputation for lashing out at everything from Western imperialism to President Obama, to Pope Francis (in this staunchly Catholic country), the EU, and the UN. He has threatened to close down all US military bases and to move his country closer to China and Russia. To emphasize his seriousness, he has canceled all joint US–Philippine military exercises.

President Putin is his hero. He is clearly leaning toward the left, and he despises colonialism. He often speaks about the “genocide” committed by the US against his people during the ‘Philippine–American War.’

He refuses to provoke and antagonize China. He is with the poor, introducing and improving social programs. He is gradually releasing political prisoners and actively negotiating peace deals with the Marxist and Muslim guerrillas while seeking peace treaties and territorial compromises with China.

He occasionally explodes, insults, and then backtracks, but he continues to steadily move forward.

“If Duterte moves too fast, he will be overthrown by the military,” explains Prof. Simbulan. “He is an ‘outsider.’ Police and the military are holding grudges against him. Most of the top brass were trained in the US. He tries to keep them engaged, visiting the military camps around the country, explaining why is he releasing political prisoners and why is he inviting left-wing cadres to the government.”

After centuries of colonialism, after the disgraceful collaboration of the military and civilian ‘elites,’ Duterte’s revolution has to be measured, changes gradual.

Prof. Simbulan is cautiously optimistic: “I evaluate Duterte positively. Duterte’s anti-imperialist policy goes beyond rhetoric; it is real and persistent. Even as mayor of Davao, he banned all US–Philippine military exercises there. The US tried to negotiate; they offered plenty of money. They wanted to build a huge drone base in Mindanao, but Duterte refused, resolutely. His track record shows: if there are irreconcilable differences, he’ll always side with the left.”

In Davao, Ms. Luzviminda Ilagan, a former member of Congress and country’s leading feminist, explains: “After Mayor Duterte announced in 2003 that no US military exercises would be allowed in his city, Davao was bombed twice: one bomb exploded at the airport, another at the pier.”

The mainstream media abroad and at home is relentlessly attacking Duterte’s ‘War on crime, drugs, and corruption.’ It is also repeating how he ‘re-buried’ former dictator Marcos at the ‘Hero Cemetery.'”

“Small pushers are resisting arrests,” explains a South Cemetery dweller. “They kill police; they have nothing to lose. It is a real war. Those who keep talking about extra-judiciary killings care only about the criminals, not about us, the citizens.”

That’s the main sentiment expressed in the slums.

“Duterte encourages police to take action,” explains Eduardo Tadem, a leading academic, Professorial Lecturer of Asian Studies (UP). “He is a lawyer, he stays within the legal limits. Some 5,000 were killed so far, but who really does the killing? Vigilantes, motorcycle gangs… The crime rate used to be horrible: killings, kidnapping, petty crime. People are fed-up with the crime. They’d support any action to stop it.”

“If we talk about extra-judicial killings, then we have to prove that the authorities are really ordering them,” explains Ms. Ilagan. “Duterte came with the names: among them some top military and police generals! Now many are being killed. But the international HRs organizations are totally misinterpreting Duterte’s role in all this. Another thing is: the number of people killed in this country is actually decreasing. Before, under Aquino, those murdered were mainly poor farmers, indigenous people, and urban poor; people fighting for their basic human rights. Under Gloria Arroyo, the foreign mining companies were even given permission to kill protesters. All this is over now.”

The President is defiant, especially when criticism comes from abroad: “I do not kneel down before anybody else, except the Filipino in Quiapo walking in misery and in extreme poverty and anger.”

Eduardo Tadem believes that burying former dictator Marcos at ‘Hero’s Cemetery’ was a gross miscalculation. “Marcos brought this country to ruins.” But he says that the act was not ideological; it was about pragmatism and ‘personal ties’. Duterte made a promise to the family of Marcos. Before the elections, he didn’t accept a member of the Marcos clan as his vice presidential running mate, but he needed the votes of his followers.

“Marshall Law was the US project,” exclaims Dr. Reynaldo Ileto, a leading historian. “But now they only talk about Marcos. Under Ramos and others, there were terrible abuses, too. The cemetery carries the ‘hero’ name, but actually, almost all former presidents are buried there. Focus on Marcos is deliberate: to raise controversy, to discredit Duterte, and to avoid real issues. Many people from the left, even Marxists, were actually working with Marcos. Duterte’s father was a minor minister in Marcos’ cabinet, but his mother was a resistance figure.”

“Duterte’s mother played an extremely important role in the protest movement against Marcos,” confirms Ms. Ilagan. “She was vocal, fearless, and she had great influence on her son. Let’s also remember that during Marshall law Duterte served as a prosecutor in Davao, and he saved many prisoners, many activists”.

Dr. Ileto’s gives a personal ‘verdict’ on President Duterte: “He is doing a great job. He is being sensible to China, while the West is doing all it can to antagonize China. This is an essential issue. Remember our past: President Arroyo visited China first, before she went to the US. She moved closer to China. She was punished: they got her indicted for ‘corruption.’

We discuss Argentina, Brazil and Ukraine and how the West invents or exaggerates ‘human rights’ and ‘corruption’ matters to ostracize, even to overthrow legitimate governments.

Now the process to discredit the rebellious President of the Philippines is already in full swing. Would Duterte’s liberal Vice-President Leni Robredo (recently expelled from the cabinet), be elevated by the Western establishment to stardom? She is pro-Washington, she is against all Duterte’s ‘wars,’ and, above all, she is against his increasingly close relationship with China. She could soon join the band of the ‘Color Revolutions’ leaders, as she leads the “yellow” Liberal Party.

“In Mindanao, people say ‘Imperialist Manila,’” explains Ms. Ileto. “Duterte is from the South, he is an anti-imperialist, he defends his people, and the elites in Manila hate him for that. He swears, curses, after all, he is Visaya – we are like that – open and outspoken. First, they thought he was a joke, but he won, he touched the people. He speaks their language; he is real.”

“What will happen if he is overthrown or killed?” I ask point blank, here in his city of Davao, on Mindanao Island.

“There would be a real danger of explosion; even of a civil war,” I am told. “And people of Mindanao would be at the forefront.”

This piece first appeared at RT.

]]>Binoy Kampmarkhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889512016-12-08T17:37:46Z2016-12-09T08:50:03ZMore]]>The UK-based Liberty Campaign expressed it most glumly. “The Government’s new Snoopers’ Charter (also known as the Investigatory Powers Bill) will allow the bulk collection of all our personal information. Who we talk to; what we say; where we are; what we look at online – everything.”

Championed while she was Home Secretary, Prime Minister Theresa May has seen her wishes fulfilled. Total surveillance – and there was already a good deal of that in Britain – is coming to the country. Late last month, the Investigatory Powers Bill, known by its faux cuddly, yet sinister term the Snoopers’ charter, received royal assent and became law.

The sense that something smelly was in the air was evident by the enthusiasm of the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd. This nasty bit of legislation was worthy of advertisement as protective, not detrimental, to privacy. In the surveillance stakes, Britain had every reason to be proud with this bit of “world-leading legislation” that provided “unprecedented transparency and substantial privacy protection.”

After trumpeting matters of privacy and transparency, Rudd came to the essential point, using the argument that the world is a terrifying place (as it always tends to be for government): “The government is clear that, at a time of heightened security threat, it is essential our law enforcement and security and intelligence services have the power they need to keep people safe. The internet presents new opportunities for terrorists and we must ensure we have the capabilities to confront this challenge.”[1]

Web and phone companies will be required to store records of websites visited by every customer for 12 months for access by the security industry, be it the police or pertinent bodies, upon the issue of warrants. This tracking does not extend to VPNs.

The warrant will be all empowering, enabling relevant security personnel to bug phones and computers. Compliance and connivance from companies is also expected, thereby coopting the private sector into undermining encryption protections. That very fact should chill companies in the business of supplying communications.

The obvious rejoinder from those favouring the Snoopers’ Charter is that it is not only snooping with a purpose, but snooping with delicate, informed oversight. As ever, the error here is to institutionalise snooping by giving some sense of sagacious self-policing.

If the intelligence services have proven one thing, the desire to overstep, and overreach in zeal, is compulsive. Even the investigatory powers tribunal, charged with the task of hearing complaints against MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, noted in October that an illegal regime in tracking and obtaining data, including web and phone use, had been operating for over 17 years.

Such behaviour draws out nightmarish scenarios of inevitability: the security services will always be there to undermine in the name of Her Majesty’s sacred priorities, while those with data will be there for the pilfering. “I never assumed my emails and internet activity are completely private,” mused Matthew Parris darkly. “Has anyone?”[2]

The intercept warrants under the new regime, by way of example, require authorisation from the Home Minister prior to judicial review. Judges, overseen by a senior judicial officer called the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, will be responsible for that task and have the power of veto.

Such padding is all well and good, but the State rarely oversees itself competently when it comes to such concepts as the greater good. Abstracted and mysterious, that greater good trumps privacy and individual civil liberties. The lust to gather data becomes insatiable.

The war against encryption has been the central object of the May brigade for some time. Importantly, it suggests institutional corrosion of basic privacy. Under Rudd’s stewardship, an attack by direct means is encouraged, despite being feather bedded by dictates of privacy.

This dysfunctional nonsense has truly given Britain a “world class” regime in surveillance that will be a model to emulate by less savoury regimes. If the Brits do it in that fashion, then why not others?

As Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group explained, Rudd was right in one sense: the IP Act was truly revolutionary in its impact. “The IP Act will have an impact that goes beyond the UK’s shores. It is likely that other countries, including totalitarian regimes with poor human rights records, will use this law to justify their own intrusive surveillance powers.”[3]

The idea that partial encryption and half-baked measures are possible is simply dismissed as wishful thinking by such industry pundits as Nic Scott, the UK and Ireland managing director of data security specialists Code42. “You either have encryption in place or you don’t. Once you create a backdoor of law enforcement powers, you are also opening the door to other, potentially malicious parties.”[4]

That backdoor has been well and truly opened, and the pool of communications data signal an open season for hackers of whatever persuasion. Goodbye Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014; welcome Orwellian state-manic insecurity and data hoovering. The only obstacle now will be the spoiling verdict of the European court of justice, if the Labour party’s Tom Watson gets his way.

]]>Guillermo R. Gilhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889232016-12-07T22:20:35Z2016-12-09T08:49:13ZMore]]>Elections were held last month in Puerto Rico. The governor elect is the 37-year old son of a former governor. He is in favor of statehood; against same-sex marriage; in favor of paying the entirety of the government’s 72 billion dollar debt (regardless of its legitimacy or its effects on the availability of public goods and services and regardless of the infringement of people’s constitutional rights repayment will most surely involve); against a gender responsive curriculum in public schools; in favor of the increased imbrication of Church and State; against the legalization of marihuana, all the while refusing to acknowledge the legality of abortion. He is a father and a husband and a Christian and a democrat and he pledges to work side by side with the federally imposed Fiscal Control Board in order to usher in a so called new epoch of fiscal responsibility in the island.

The board or la junta recently met in Puerto Rico, on the grounds of an out of the way, luxury resort. Its first two meetings were held in New York, where the seven-member unit took control of all major governmental agencies and public corporations, including the only state-run university system. As such, it is primed to function as an un-elected governmental body which, for many, rendered the elections mute.

Thus, in campaigning, candidates not only made every effort to sell themselves as the better option for governor, but also struggled rather mightily to craft a vision of la junta as a responsive entity. And so, depending on the candidate and the day and the particular question or issue raised, la junta was a partner, or a monitor, or an older brother of sorts; or, really, just offered the elected governor an unprecedented opportunity for Puerto Rico to prove itself to the world financial markets. Other times, la junta was just punishment for decades of irresponsible public spending and governmental corruption and unscrupulous politicians who were not humble or honest enough to recognize that Puerto Rico, as a non-autonomous economy, could not generate enough activity to keep up with its obligations with its creditors and with its people, without taking on more and more debt. Interestingly enough, the one narrative strain that remained constant was that la junta. while certainly a colonial imposition that lacerated our collective dignity and our democracy, was ultimately something that could be worked with or worked around—though not necessarily worked over (in the sense of hustled)—for the betterment of all.

In the end, only one candidate of the six, explicitly pledged to disobey any and every dictum originating from the board. She received less than 3% of the vote in an election where only 56% of the electorate participated. And so, the tale of a Puerto Rico eager to acquiesce to the bluntest form of colonial repression it has been exposed to since 1952 has been told and retold in the last few months with increasing regularity. After all, opposition to la junta, as some may argue, has been relatively modest in scale: a few community groups created, meetings, workshops, a slew of Facebook pages and viral posts, op-ed pieces, a protest against the major island newspaper, a protest against the local chamber of commerce, a protest against female entrepreneurs in a Hilton hotel, an early morning occupation of the board’s president’s business office, a civil disobedience camp in front of the U.S. District Courthouse, a march on election day under the rain. And a people’s assembly, which was touted as bringing together representatives from all major sectors of island society and the Puerto Rican diaspora to form a collective, organized front of militant opposition.

The assembly was held on June 25th and was sponsored, in part, by the San Juan municipal government. While it was open to the public, it was not open to public participation as both its speaker list and its agenda of activism were settled beforehand by organizers. This provoked a smaller public amongst the larger public present to stage a protest, demanding that the assembly be open for debate and deliberation. The demand was met with hostility and calls to silence from the stage. However, the disruption was effective enough for organizers to hasten to close the affairs of the day, as the San Juan mayor directed her staff to gather up all the folding chairs.

These events garnered the rebuke from people in more traditional leftist circles who lamented the seemingly intrinsic inability of the left in Puerto Rico to come together for a common goal. And so, the protesters who protested the protest assembly were chastised in both alternative and mainstream media outlets for being too near-sighted, too disrespectful, too impatient and too willful.

Sara Ahmed defines the will as “the capacity or potential to enact a ‘no’, the potential to not be determined from without, by an external force.” She continues stating, “the will signifies that it is better to leave the right place than to stay at the right place because you are unable to move on your own.”

As it pertains to the question of place and in relation to the willfulness of the small group of people that opposed those gathered in organized, top-down opposition to the Fiscal Control Board, Ariadna Godreau has argued that la junta presents a serious tactical problem for activists. Insomuch as the board does not have a physical, permanent address, it cannot properly be addressed by taking the street. For where exactly does one protest against the board? La junta as such is nowhere to be found in Puerto Rico. It is not at the U.S. District Courthouse nor at the Federal Detention Center nor can it be found along our U.S. Coast guard guarded borders. It will only be present, Godreau argues, in its coming effects on the health, the education and employment prospects of present and future generations. And it is present already, I would argue, in the ritualized mimicry of its undemocratic, colonialist procedures and forms. A mimicry that can even be staged within instances of opposition to it. For where is la junta more present than in a people’s assembly that does not allow interventions from the very people who responded to the call? Where is la junta more present than in an opposition that pushes a bottom line—consensus—like the board pushes a bottom line—debt repayment?

What is needed then is not so much a bottom line as the enacted potential for a no; a willfulness of the opposition that would take us from ritualized mimicry of colonialism to the adoption and repetition of rituals of disregard. An opposition that errs on the side of excess, for if la junta has no discernible place in Puerto Rico then it’s on activists to act as if anybody, anywhere or anything under colonial rule could very well be a placeholder for the board.

Consider, for example, a protest staged in the entrance to the Caribe Hilton hotel in San Juan on occasion of a women entrepreneurs conference. One of the featured speakers was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. It just so happens that the event coincided with the 50th anniversary of the U.S. District Court of Puerto Rico. Protesters—most of them confused as to the nature of the activity they were protesting—blocked vehicle access to hotel grounds, thus forcing attendees—some of them women from impoverished communities—to walk long distances and miss out on the early morning events. At one point, one of the protesters smashed her loudspeaker on the hood of a passersby’s SUV. The move seemed excessive, uncalled for and, at the time, threatened to escalate tensions between protesters and the police, who had not physically intervened with the demonstration. Some twenty minutes later, several arrests were made.

In looking back at the event, I wonder if the smashing of the loudspeaker was the enactment of a no. If the protester was assuming the role of that willful subject that will not let the forms of her opposition be dictated to her from a stage in an assembly she cannot take part in. Her actions indicate, I think, a desire to opt out of the joy, let’s say, of putting up a collective front of opposition. They indicate, perhaps, that socio-political conditions in Puerto Rico right now are not conducive to large scale, tidy, consensual mobilization efforts but rather lead individual actors to the “edges of feasibility” (Nicole Smythe Johnson); to points at which their lives as such do not seem livable anymore. And so, some leave for the U.S. (to the rate of 150 people per day); some hold to the dominant ideology of staying put for the sake of family and cultural pride; some hunker down and assume the end of times with a healthy dose of cynicism, content perhaps to find some some solace among their Facebook contacts; and some push the limits of our political imagination by acting out in unpredictable, irresponsible ways.

In the protest, after arrests had been made and without any visible police threat to herself, that same protester proceeded to sit on top a compañero, laying on the street and hugged it out—in a sort of lovers ‘embrace—shouting that police would have to take them both. For some of us present, it seemed like she wasn’t so much responding to events as they were actually unfolding but rather to the event as she had imagined it unraveling. The Spanish phrase for this is “vivirse la pelicula” which communicates not only a subject’s lack of grounding in reality but also her desire for a starring role of sorts. It is a type of pretention: if you set out that day to dramatically resist being arrested by cops, you carry out your resistance even if cops are unwilling to arrest you. Because the mere presence of police implies the threat of arrest, and thus, protesters must willfully imagine and enact creative, meaningful ways to either avoid or engage that threat in an effort to sincerely embody what is at stake on a larger scale.

When demonstrators were told that Sotomayor was not there commemorating the anniversary of the court, the protester could be heard yelling “it doesn’t matter.” It didn’t matter, perhaps, because what was (and is) at stake for her (and for us) is the possibility of inhabiting a place where representatives of the US government cannot freely vacation or spend time during a layover or do any business whatsoever without being confronted with the context and consequences of their presence here. It is a type of weaponizing of the landscape of the weak, if you will. Or at least of the weakest spots within an already weakened landscape, too worn down by precarity and crisis politics to inspire any large scale mobilizations on its behalf.

“It doesn’t matter” then is a goodbye of sorts to whatever it is that Puerto Ricans on the left (and on the right) think the country should be in the midst of this crisis. A goodbye to the notion that individual and/or collective actions are supposed to be building blocks for future actions. It doesn’t matter whether they are or not. What matters is that ‘I’ am taking advantage of this opportunity to live out the movie of my dreams. Is that pretentious or is that revolutionary? Does it even matter if the dream is predicated on a very simple and ultimately unquestionable truth: Puerto Rico is a colony of the U.S. La junta is the most brutal, violent and offensive manifestation of this reality in recent times. Living is no longer feasible here. I am for feasibility by any means necessary.

That last bit was from Spike Lee’s Malcom X movie, which I started watching but never finished. But it doesn’t matter in so much as what I really want to say is that I am for feasibility by all unnecessary means as well; which is to say that if the board cannot be spotted in Puerto Rico, then one must pick whatever spot on the map is accessible for a protest or a disruption of some sort. Even if the spot chosen has already been reserved for purposes of opposing the board. What matters are the terms of the opposition. And perhaps the only terms acceptable when facing a seemingly impossible situation is the will to say no. To not be defined from above or outside. To opt out and go live in a movie inside your head. The body, however, is on the street.

]]>Patrick Bondhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889362016-12-08T16:52:49Z2016-12-09T08:48:40ZMore]]>Standard&Poors (S&P) gave South Africa a fearful few hours of anticipation last Friday, just after dust from the political windstorm of the prior week settled. The agency downgraded the government’s securities that are denominated in the local currency (the rand) although refrained from the feared junk status on international securities. It was a moment for the ruling business and political party elites’ introspection, but in heaving a sigh of relief they are not looing far enough.

At a time of near-recessionary conditions and rising unemployment, local and international observers are probably mistaken to consider President Jacob Zuma a nearly spent force. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) turned to well-tested procrastination and cover-up strategies to yet again protect Zuma last Monday. The prior weekend’s meeting of the ANC National Executive Committee (NEC) had considered the notion that he should step down, presumably to be replaced by his deputy, the billionaire (and former trade unionist) Cyril Ramaphosa, well ahead of the scheduled December 2017 ANC leadership vote. (The other major contender for ANC president is Zuma’s ex-wife, outgoing African Union chairperson Nkosozana Dlamini-Zuma, with ANC Treasurer Zweli Mkhize a potential compromise candidate.)

A reported third of the NEC delegates were supportive of his recall, but Zuma once again remained in control. The party’s ability to ‘self-correct’ appears to have expired, with a great many leaders ‘captured’ by a carefully-constructed patronage system centred on three immigrant-Indian brothers, the Guptas. Deputy Finance Minister Mcebesi Jonas provided evidence of that system last March, in the form of the Guptas’ oral offer to him to become Finance Minister (along with a $43 million inducement) if he served their interests in major procurement contracts.

ANC Secretary General Gwede Mantashe then announced, “We will deal with the broader picture. We are refusing to be narrow in dealing with this matter because the threat is bigger than this one incident.” In May, however, he ended the Gupta ‘state capture’ investigation, saying it was ‘fruitless’ supposedly because of inadequate evidence. Last month, however, the outgoing independent Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, released a blockbuster report summarising the evidence of Gupta malfeasance, which compelled the electricity parastatal leader to step down in humiliation.

Last week was even more eventful, what with the internal ANC attempt to oust Zuma. No doubt, opposition parties from the centre-right (Democratic Alliance) and far left (Economic Freedom Fighters) quietly welcomed the continuation of Zuma’s reign because a far worse outcome would have been his replacement by Ramaphosa. In spite of his role in the Marikana massacre, he will be a harder opponent to ridicule in the months ahead.

Again rated just shy of junk

But major investors were obviously hoping Zuma would fall, and that Ramaphosa’s ascension would end the career threat against their favourite ANC politician, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan. Given how much power the credit ratings agencies wield, Gordhan appears to have been spared an anticipated cabinet reshuffle in which Zuma goes for broke. The agencies retain this power because while Fitch, Moody’s and S&P offered pessimistic commentary on Zuma’s reign in their most recent statements, they did not downgrade South Africa to junk status. The whip remains poised above South Africa’s head, awaiting next June’s ratings.

The reprieve left the whole economically-aware population of South Africa cautiously celebrating. However, last Friday’s statement by S&P – typically a stricter judge than Fitch and Moody’s – lacked logic and conviction, aside from predictable neo-liberal nostrum to cut the budget deficit and reduce labour’s limited influence even further. On the other hand, S&P’s incompetence may allow South Africans to better dispute the all-encompassing power of ratings agencies.

For these are dangerous institutions whose mistakes – e.g. as the 2008 world financial meltdown gathered pace, giving AAA investment grade ratings to Lehman Brothers and AIG just before they crashed, as well as to Enron four days before it fell in 2001 – can be catastrophic to investors and the broader economy.

No wonder the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) Goa leadership summit in October agreed to explore “setting up an independent BRICS Rating Agency based on market-oriented principles, in order to further strengthen the global governance architecture.” However, given how poorly “market-oriented principles” hold up in the chaotic world financial system, and given the dominance of neoliberal economic bureaucrats within the BRICS, this strategy appears as self-defeating as the BRICS’ alleged ‘governance’ reform of the International Monetary Fund last December. Then, aside from South Africa (which lost 21 percent of its vote), four BRICS increased IMF voting shares at the expense of Nigeria and Venezuela (each of which lost -41%), and many more poor countries from Africa and Latin America.

This week the main question to ponder is why, given utterly zany politics and the stagnant economy, was South Africa not downgraded all the way to junk? S&P lowered the risk rating of local state securities, but not the sovereign (foreign) debt grade. The main reasons S&P gave are telling:

“the ratings on South Africa reflect our view of the country’s large and active local currency fixed-income market, as well as the authorities’ commitment to gradual fiscal consolidation. We also note that South Africa’s institutions, such as the judiciary, remain strong while the South Africa Reserve Bank (SARB) maintains an independent monetary policy.”

Translation:

+ “the country’s large and active local currency fixed-income market” = pension and insurance funds keep buying government bonds because residual exchange controls force 75% of such funds to stay inside SA and create a large artificial demand for state securities;

+ “the authorities’ commitment to gradual fiscal consolidation” = Gordhan promised that the budget deficit will fall from this year’s 3.4% to 2.5% by 2019, even though this requires cuts into the very marrow of already tokenistic social grants. It will result in recent increases for 17 million recipients falling below the inflation rate faced by poor people;

+ “South Africa’s institutions, such as the judiciary, remain strong” = not only do the courts regularly smack down Zuma’s excesses, but more importantly they also religiously uphold property rights, which in South Africa are ranked 24th most secure out of 140 countries surveyed by the Davos-based World Economic Forum; and

+ “the SARB maintains an independent monetary policy” = in spite of incredibly high consumer debt loads (nearly half the country’s active borrowers are ‘credit impaired,’ according to the National Credit Regulator, having missed three repayments), the SARB has raised interest rates six times since 2014, to levels amongst the world’s highest.

Another reason S&P is optimistic is supposedly that “The trade deficit is declining on the lower price of oil (which constitutes about one-fifth of South Africa’s imports),” but in reality, the trade deficit just exploded. South Africa had a $1.4 billion trade surplus in May, but this became to a $330 million deficit in October. Meanwhile over the past month, the oil price soared 21%, from $43 to $52 per barrel, and last Friday, OPEC’s latest collusion to cut output aims to push it past $60 in coming weeks. (And the stronger rand witnessed over the course of 2016 did not offset that rise: over the last month, the rand fell from 13.2/$ to 13.8/$; its last peak was R6.3/$ five years ago.)

Revealing silences

Not only are S&P’s rudimentary observations off target, the silences in its statement are also disturbing. If we consider crunch problems that might lead to a drastic financial crisis here, S&P was surprisingly blasé about the country’s foreign debt. The last SARB Quarterly Bulletinrecords that debt at the highest ever (as a ratio of GDP) in modern SA history: 43% (higher than PW Botha’s default level of 40% in 1985).

Neither does S&P mention illicit financial flows (which have been estimated by Global Financial Integrity at $20 bn/year); or the balance of payments deficit due to profit and dividend outflows (usually more than $10 bn/year) following excessive exchange control liberalisation; or South Africa’s exceptionally high international interest rates on 10-year state bonds, at 9% (3rd amongst 60 major economies, only lower than rates in Brazil and Turkey which both pay 11%). Corporate overcharging on state outsourcing – which the Treasury’s Kenneth Brown says costs taxpayers $17 billion per year – does not warrant a mention.

To S&P’s credit, however, the agency gave critics of big business at least minor affirmation by observing “the corporate sector’s current preference to delay private investment, despite high margins and large cash positions.” In an opposite signal, though, S&P also gave the country’s leading disinvestor, Anglo American, an improved rating on Friday (all the ratings agencies had reduced Anglo to junk status in February). S&P isn’t about to downgrade the disinvesting firms, and state-directed reinvestment – e.g. as in 1960s South Korea – is not on the cards. So in media coverage this foundational critique of our big corporates’ ‘capital strike’ was only barely mentioned by a sole local periodical (Business Report).

It still strikes me that like the Gupta and (Stellenbosch-based Afrikaner tycoon) Rupert families, the three ratings agencies will continue attracting the accusation of “state capture!” insofar as the public policy this neoliberal foreign family dictates is also characterised by short-term self-interest, occasional serious oversights and national economic self-destruction. The only reasonable solution is progressive delinking from the circuits of world finance through which these agencies accumulate their unjustified power.

]]>Clancy Sigalhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889672016-12-09T19:12:52Z2016-12-09T08:45:52ZMore]]>(A dictionary definition of trial balloon is “a tentative measure taken or statement made to see how a new policy will be received”.)

Here’s the scoop: The New York Observer, a failing newspaper owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, calls for the FBI to crackdown on nationwide anti-Trump protests.

Titled “Comey’s FBI Needs to Investigate Violent Democratic Tantrums,” it’s by Austin Bay, a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel who (God help the students) teaches at Austin’s University of Texas.

Jim Naureckas, editor of Extra!, the media watchdog magazine, says “It struck me as a ‘first they came for the communists’ moment. He ties up this conspiracy of protesters, people seeking recounts and George Soros into one vast conspiracy that the FBI ought to get to the bottom of.”

People like Jared Kushner and Col. Bay know how Trump thinks. As in the Third Reich they seek promotion by anticipating what they believe The Leader wants by his body language and dropped hints (today’s tweets). Which is to scare us.

Our take? Follow the lead of California’s Democratic state legislators and be combative as hell. We’ll be punished anyway so might as well explore how to be nonviolently “vile and dangerous”.

]]>Pierre Labossiere – Margaret Prescodhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889972016-12-09T19:37:03Z2016-12-09T08:40:52ZMore]]>Lead Up to Election Day

Friday, November 18th was the last day of campaigning for Haiti’s Presidential and Parliamentary elections which were to be held on Sunday, November 20th. On Friday we visited Delmas 2 where we met with activists on the ground including women and men. Preparations were underway for the get-out-the vote campaign. In Delmas 2 there were banners and other materials for the Lavalas Presidential candidate Dr. Maryse Narcisse. Several people expressed to us the widespread concern that the election maybe stolen, nevertheless the people we spoke to felt it was nevertheless important to vote.

Later on Friday, we visited Cite Soleil where a massive march was taking place. The March preceded and followed a motorcade with former Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide and Dr. Maryse Narcisse. Tens of thousands took part in the march. The atmosphere was festive with music and dancing. The mood in the crowd was determined, although some we spoke to also expressed concerns about a stolen election, people generally seemed enthusiastic about voting. A popular song poking fun at Jovenal Moise the candidate endorsed by former President Michel Martelly entitled “Banann” was often played and all seemed to know the words and sang along.

Early that evening there was a massive Lavalas rally at the old airfield in Delmas 2. The crowd grew to tens of thousands. There was a notable lack of western media present at that rally. The mood was joyful and enthusiastic, many there said, including some of the speakers, that if the election was not fraudulent, Dr. Narcisse would win on the first round.

On Saturday, November 19th no election campaigning was allowed. We visited a few neighborhoods including various parts of Delmas and spoke with people. In one upscale neighborhood, a young man who spoke English said he was not going to vote because “everyone knows the US selects our President, no matter who we vote for.”

Voting Process

We started out early on election day Sunday, November 20th. We travelled in a motorcade with a couple of National Electoral Observers. We visited between 12-15 voting centers based in several neighborhoods, including the upscale Petion-Ville, and the impoverished area of Cite Soleil. The Voting Centers were based in schools or similar facilities. Each Voting Center housed on average 20 to 50+ polling stations, individual voting booths made from sturdy cardboard were inside the polling stations.

There was a list outside each polling center with the names of people who were to vote at that center. Then within each polling station there was another list and one’s name had to be on both lists to vote. After people voted, they were to sign next to their names or be fingerprinted; voters’ thumbs were then stained with indelible ink to indicate that they voted.

On the surface, everything appeared calm since early day concerns of physical violence did not materialize, but as the day wore on those who were not able to vote were quite agitated. Most of the Voting Centers we visited were busy, several with lines outside.

Voting Day Problems

A number of people stated that they could not vote because they had no voter ID; it was simply impossible for certain people to obtain this ID card.

Example: One man applied over 14 months ago and after 6 or 7 fruitless, time-consuming trips to the crowded ONI office that provides the voter ID cards, he could not vote in the elections.

Many voters with voter ID cards could not find their names on the voter lists posted outside voting centers and unable to vote.

Example: Several voters determined to vote told us that they stopped after searching for their names at three or even four voting centers. A few voters with more resources (like a vehicle) and connections said that they were successful only after visiting 3 or 4 centers. One elderly woman in Carrefour/Kafou who was at her fourth voting center stated that she could find no assistance and was too tired to continue to try to vote.

Voters with ID cards could not find their names on the voter lists inside polling stations when their names were on the lists posted outside. Also, many voters could not find their names on the list outside the voting center.

Example: Voters told us of their frustrating search from one polling station to another inside several voting centers; they were advised by CEP staff to try another voting center.

Voters with voter ID cards were inexplicably re-assigned to vote in other far away voting centers, miles from their place of residence and even in different cities

Example: Several voters we met faced this, including a man residing in the Carrefour/Kafou neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. He found out after a fruitless search at each of the polling stations inside the voting center where he had always voted that this time he could not vote there. He had been reassigned to vote in the locality of Haut-du-Cap about 147 miles away.

Voters with voter ID cards who had been provided information by the CEP/KEP phone service about where to vote were not allowed to vote.

Example: Several frustrated voters showed us SMS messages on their phone from the CEP/KEP (Provisional Electoral Council) directing them to their respective voting center. When they got there, their names could not be found on the voting center lists.

In many cases, the CEP/KEP phone service to assist voters in locating their assigned voting centers and polling stations was not functioning on election day.

Example: We talked to voters who tried with no success to connect with the numbers of the CEP/KEP phone service, and ended up not voting because they did not know where to vote.

Voters inside a voting center were prevented from voting while standing in line.

Example: Voters in Cite Soleil/Site Soley who had entered the Voting Center before the 4pm voting deadline and were looking for their polling station or waiting in line outside their polling station were not allowed to vote. Officials stated that they could not vote since they we not inside the individualized voting booths by 4:00 p.m. Their protests were in vain, indeed they were met by police with large long guns.

The countrywide electrical blackout that occurred one hour or so after the polls closed during the vote counting has led to widespread charges of “magouy” or massive fraud, including vote-switching and ballot dumping during that time.

The Haitian elite media illegally reported results of voting at selected polling stations about two hours after the polls closed claiming a huge win for Jovenel Moise, the candidate of the PHTK party of former Duvalierist president Martelly.

We heard numerous reports that Digicel phone company was observed outside of voting centers illegally giving out to voters’ phone cards of a monetary value with the emblem and photo of Jovenel Moise candidate of PHTK. People were also reporting that Digicel was sending phone messages to its customers urging a vote for the PHTK candidate.

Voting centers in rural areas, per several reports we heard from rural voters, are located about 20 km or more from many voters’ place of residence. In addition to the great distances to travel with none to very limited transportation, rural voters encountered all the other problems described above.

A large market in Petion-Ville that benefited impoverished market women and their customers was burned to the ground on election night. The market women lost everything. A member of our delegation visited the market and met with the women. The women said the fire was “political”.

Reports of Fraud

+ There are reports (and photos) of uncounted, discarded and burnt ballots marked for the other candidates found in different areas of Haiti

+ Reports of ballot stuffing

+ Long unexplained delays for the transfer of official tally sheets of individual ballots from the polling stations to the central tabulation center

+ A large number of tally sheets were missing required authentication, including voter signatures or fingerprints.

+ The countrywide electrical power outage that occurred one hour after the polls had closed, as votes were being counted; the nearly 2-hour darkness raised much alarm among a knowledgeable and vigilant public fearing that like the 2015 elections, that a vote switching operation was under way.

Conclusions

Observations of voting activities on the day of the election, lead to the conclusion that there was widespread organized voter suppression which impacted the reported election results. Eligible voters were kept from voting using methods described above, this negatively impacted the number of voters declared to have cast their ballots.

One of the major complaints targeted ONI (Office National d’Identification), the only agency designated to issue required voter ID cards, as an estimated 2 million voters were deprived of these cards. Voters who had ID cards were often unable to vote because they could not find their assigned voting centers.

The Provisional Electoral Council (CEP or KEP) provided no organized assistance at most of the voting centers. The CEP/KEP phone assistance lines were not working. The many members of the electorate unable to vote complained that these actions had been orchestrated by the CEP/KEP to deny them their right to vote.

Despite voter suppression, large numbers of Fanmi Lavalas supporters did manage to go to the polls. In Cite Soleil/Site Soley alone (17% of the national electorate), enough Lavalas supporters voted for the election to have had a different result than the preliminary result put forward by the CEP.

Thousands of Haitians have been taking to the streets in daily massive protests since 11/21/16, the day after the elections. They are accusing the CEP/KEP of having organized an electoral coup d’état in favor of Jovenel Moise, the PHTK party candidate chosen by Duvalierist former president Martelly to be his successor.

Dr. Maryse Narcisse, Moise Jean-Charles and Jude Celestin have all refused to accept the results and have officially contested the results.

Three members of the nine-member CEP refused to sign off on the preliminary results.

Protests by the grassroots are growing each day as more of these details have surfaced. These protests are expected to continue in the face of the CEP’s giving Jovenel Moise a first-round win at 55%.

Brutal police repression against peaceful demonstrators has included the use of tear gas, high-pressure liquid irritant, beatings, shootings and arbitrary arrests. The 1:00 a.m. tear gas attack on 11/29/16 by UN trained and supervised Haitian police against impoverished residents of the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Lasalin resulted in the death of 3 babies with several people hospitalized.

Pierre Labossiere, Haiti Action Committee/Oakland California.

Margaret Prescod, host of Pacifica Radio’s “Sojourner Truth.”

]]>Charles R. Larsonhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889742016-12-08T22:10:09Z2016-12-09T07:10:33ZMore]]>There’s nothing more informative about one of Africa’s most troubled states in the past half dozen years than Helon Habila’s The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria. The slim little book (part of Columbia’s Global Reports) was written by the award-winning Nigerian novelist who was born in the area and—although he lives in the United States—returned to the war-torn northeastern area of his country, where he conducted interviews (including with three of the escaped abducted girls) and, then, placed his conclusions within the context of Nigeria’s post-Independence history. The result is a damning picture of Nigeria’s failed leadership, ethnic tensions, and squandered oil wealth, one of the saddest stories of post-colonialism and—in a disturbing way—a warning for other nations (including the United States) to get their act together.

Habila makes it clear that when the 276 girls were abducted, April 14, 2014, the Nigerian government, under President Goodluck Jonathan, was not concerned. I happened to be in Lagos that week and although there was TV coverage of the abductions, no response was forthcoming from the government. It took another month, of external pressure, before there was acknowledgement of the tragedy, after initially denying that the kidnappings had happened. That lackadaisical concern from the government speaks volumes and pretty much sums up Jonathan’s response to everything. If it couldn’t be converted into profit for his cronies, forget it. Obviously, the month lost before there was a response was crucial, rendering their rescue almost impossible. This is all doubly ironic because the girls were at a government school, i.e., presumably “under the care of the government.”

That care was worthless as the incivility of the Nigerian police and army had demonstrated for years. Citizens have learned that in responding to a crime or violent act, you never call the military or the police, because they will make things worse, typically by destroying or taking all of your property. Here is Habila’s bleak observation: “The ones at the top keep the door shut because they don’t want to share the spoils of office. Actual violence, or the threat of it, helps to keep the populace in check, just as poverty does. Keep the people scared and hungry, encourage them to occasionally purge their anger on each other through religiously sanctioned violence, and you can go on looting the treasury without interference.” This is what I have been told repeatedly by Nigerians during my most recent visits to their country. The statement also becomes an explanation for the government’s tepid response to earlier violence by Boko Haram. When Habila asked locals if they thought the girls would ever be returned, the response was that “We put our trust in God.”

The entrenchment of trickle-down violence and corruption has grown out of decades of failed governments, political coups, economic breakdown, a civil war because of ethnic tensions, and the rise of earlier fanatical groups. Here’s an insight I have never previously encountered: “If one were to point to a single event in Nigeria’s history that marked the rise of this age of intolerance, it would be the Maitatsine uprising of the 1980s. Named for its sect founder Muhammadu Marwa, who was popularly known as Maitatsine, meaning ‘one who curses’ because of his penchant for shouting curses at ‘nonbelievers’ while preaching. Marwa was originally from Cameroon, but had lived in the city of Kano on and off for decades and had amassed a large following among the poor, the many unemployed immigrants from Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, and the almajirai [Koranic students]. Marwa was not only controversial but truly radical, as he denounced part of the Koran, criticized the Prophet Muhammad, and even claimed to be a prophet himself.” Boko Haram is an offshoot of this earlier fundamentalist group. We have seen similar hijackings of Islam in other parts of the world. As the Chief Imam of Chibok told Habila (who is not a Muslim), “They now even kill other Muslims, they throw bombs in mosques while people are praying. Islam doesn’t sanction that. This is just a sect with its own doctrine and its own way of thinking, but it is not Islam.”

When Habila visited the area, in the spring of this year, what he encountered was burned-out schools and ghost towns. There are also hundreds of refugee camps “all over the northeast, Yola, Bauchi, Gombe, Damaturu, Kano, and of course Maiduguri. And now that the war had spread into neighboring countries, there were camps in Chad, Nigeria, and Cameroon.” Refugees in these camps who live under Boko Haram’s rule are typically traumatized; they often cannot return to “their families, the perception being that they and the children they were forced to bear through rape [are] still brainwashed, and likely to become terrorists in the future.” One can only wonder how all of this will end for the victims themselves and their families, in spite of a recent decrease of Boko Haram violence because of the more effective policies of Nigeria’s current leader, Mahammadu Buhari.

Not all of the Chibok girls remain in captivity. About a fifth of the original number managed to escape during the abductions (jumping from trucks, fleeing into the bush.) Others escaped later and have managed to return to school; a few have even been brought to the United States for education. Yet the ramifications of the Chibok abductions have extended far beyond the girls themselves. “Since the kidnapping in 2014, at least eighteen parents had died of stress-related illnesses like heart failure, stomach ulcers, and hypertension. Boko Haram had killed a few others.” As I write this in late-October, 21 of the kidnapped girls have been released, but it is doubtful if many of the others will ever be returned.

Helon Habila is unflinching in his view of cause and effect. Poor leadership in Nigeria has resulted in horrifying consequences for the people least likely able to take care of themselves, those at the bottom of the society. Boko Haram sprung from poverty, from poor education, from limited opportunities for young people, and religious fanatics seizing an opportunity to enhance their own power and authority.

It’s hard to see how Nigeria can ameliorate decade-long abuses of power at the top, curtail corruption, and redirect its income from oil so that its riches (especially its people themselves, their ingenuity and diversity) can become the dynamic powerhouse that for too long has been more vision than reality.

‘Tis the season to think about the next season. Before letting the wave of Christmas gifts crash of over their heads and/or into the digital stockings, and before undertaking their own yuletide retail therapy to help snap the U. K. out of its pre-postpartum Brexit depression, this island nation’s youths of college age have now to face the trial of interviews and auditions.

In the next room as I write, young George does his vocal warm-ups for a mid-morning audition at the Royal College of Music. He hopes to become an opera singer. His baritone calisthenics concluded, he launches into the opening of one of Brahms’s Four Serious Songs: Ich wandte mich und sahe an—“I turned and looked at all under the sun who have suffered injustice.” This seems a fitting lyric for someone who within two hours will be facing his own trial before a musical jury of his non-peers. The song’s opening is sparse and tentative, yet somehow also weighted with angst. There’s no brash enunciation of brave deeds to be done. It’s all fateful confrontation with truth rather than wrathful vengeance.

In the context of an audition the ardent feeling for “the tears of the oppressed” expressed a short time later could well be taken to refer to the aspirant himself, though George has the English public school bearing—and presumably training as well—to suppress any such displays of emotion when under duress.

The Four Serious Songs were composed in the year before Brahms’ death in 1897. Clara Schumann, the long-time object of his unrequited love, lay on her own deathbed. The song inexorably pivots towards mortality: “Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead.” For a singer to sing about dying—on stage, or before a panel of hanging musical judges—seems a risky business, but George is in good voice.

He’s now emerged from his ad hoc studio and grabs his backpack. He’s in the last year of his studies German and Italian and Oxford, so I give him the Teutonic version of the English-language theatrical boost: “Hals- und Beinbruch!”—break your neck and your leg. Leave it to the Germans to inflict maximum bodily harm as they shove the poor victim onto the stage. As he bravely descends the steps I slightly regret that ironic bit of encouragement. He’ll need his throat.

Earlier George had told me his brother was up at Cambridge for an interview at one of the colleges there. Those who want to be admitted to Oxford or Cambridge must go up for an interview with their prospective tutor. The students apply in a given subject: the Brits specialize earlier than their American counterparts rather than going for the liberal arts smorgasbord.

Somewhat coincidentally, I had spent a couple of days amongst the mist-shrouded crenellations and spires of the storied center of learning that is Cambridge. The place was thrumming with eager, nervous-looking applicants flanked by one or, more frequently, two of their parents.

I scanned my subjects for the shared familial expressions of concern. These were etched more deeply on the older generation’s faces, but genetically unmistakable on the younger ones as well. At times I felt like a pith-helmeted anthropologist studying the primitive ways of the modern Brits and their foreign imitators, most of them once ruled by these same island folk.

One parent informed me ruefully that it used to be that the school boy—and since about 1980 at most colleges, school girl—took the train up from London himself and made his way through the ordeal without age-based back-up. That has changed, since in all things the Old Country now models itself after its former colony across the Atlantic. Just as Roman culture was carried on in Byzantine after the Fall of Rome, so too America is now the engine of the British Empire.

Take for example that venerable bunch of judges who make up the country’s highest court, for centuries called the Law Lords. Not so long ago, they’ve been rebranded according to the America mode as the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court. Sure they keep the wigs and snazzy gold-brocaded robes, but gone is the name and with it the connotation of superiority and privilege that clings to the concept Lords. We’ve been hearing a lot about this posse of ten men and a single women recently, since they will soon make a decision as to whether to send Brexit to Parliament for approval. Word came down yesterday from the Lord Chief Justice that the referendum would not be overturned. Another foundational American institution, McDonald’s, isn’t waiting for the final judgment, however: the Big Mac purveyor announced this morning that it would fold the arches at its European headquarters in Luxembourg and relocate back to the U. K.

Give this larger cultural trend, it’s not particularly surprising that the sky over East Anglia is dark with fully-weaponized helicopter parents of American design. They touch down at the portals to ancient Cambridge colleges, and their youngsters’ boots hit the cobbles and charge into the porter’s lodge, leaving the old folks alone and exposed to the enemy fire of Chinese tourist iPhone video fusillades. Calling in air cover on their Bluetooth ear pieces, mum and dad pull back to the nearest Starbucks or kindred safe haven.

I retreated to a satellite village on the Cambridge periphery—a manor house of Queen Anne vintage. There are portraits of the ancestors running up the walls in the main stairs. There’s a fire crackling in the hall, and a broken down Rolls-Royce from the 1930s in the carriage house. A tiger skin hangs on the hall leading down to the breakfast room.

Within a few minutes of my arrival, the lord of the manor has told me all about his time in America and many other things, too, including the fact that Pablo Casals’s Hamburg Steinway grand is moored down in the library. His cello-playing debutante mother was the great Spanish cellist’s favorite student—at least according to my interlocutor. He ushers me towards the instrument whose peeling veneer indicates that too many years of its life were spent near the fire. I start into Brahm’s Intermezzo in A Major, opus 118, no. 2. On the piano facing me are photographs of Margaret Thatcher from the 1980s; the owner’s ex-wife shaking hands with Prince Charles; and Bill Clinton with an arm around my guide’s daughter.

Only late Brahms—again!—could survive such a visual assault. This is music that captures both the fading dreams and the hopes of youth.

]]>Martha Durkee-Neumanhttp://www.counterpunch.org/?p=889422016-12-09T23:59:55Z2016-12-09T07:01:49ZMore]]>Each generation carries its own revolution. For years, gun violence has dramatically impacted communities around the United States and a movement for gun violence prevention has emerged to respond. Now, as we reel and rebuild from the results of the election, it is the time for a new generation of organizers to metamorph this movement into one that is intersectional, inclusive and diverse. Young organizers and activists have been left behind by a movement that has focused strongly on background checks but needs to also strategically focus on responses that address the intersectional oppressions linked to gun violence.

My experience with gun violence reflects this nuance. In 2008, my Peruvian host sister Tika Paz de Noboa was shot and killed while she waited on the street outside a nightclub in Portland, Oregon. A courageous, artistic young woman, a person of color, an immigrant; she was murdered by a white man who bought the weapon used to kill her from a gun show, evading regulation background checks that would have picked up on the mental health struggle that eventually ended both my host sister’s life and his own.

The layers of intersectionality in Tika’s case are clear; she was a woman, Latina, Spanish-speaking, and new to the US. Was she killed simply because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and the gun show loophole allowed a gun to be purchased? Or was she killed because this man fell through the cracks of the mental health care system in the US? Was she killed because rampant xenophobia in the US created cycles of hate against immigrants? Was she killed by misogyny and toxic masculinity that drove this man to shoot this woman? Every circumstance of violence is unique and nuanced and complex; background checks will reduce gun violence but will not be effective without understanding the intersectional nature of the oppressions people face.

Nearly ninety Americans are killed by guns every day by a combination of homicides, suicides and accidental shootings. Yet, when the statistics are desegregated, intersectional patterns appear. 77% of gun deaths for white Americans are suicides, while 82% of gun deaths for black Americans are homicides. Unarmed black men are six times more likely to die at the hands of police than unarmed white men. 53% of women murdered with guns in the U.S. were killed by intimate partners. Our approaches to gun violence prevention must be critically and continually aware of these differences and discrepancies. When we talk about prevention we need to address the root causes of gun violence, rather than act reactively to illogical fallacies.

In 2015, I was in Paris during the attacks of terror on the city. I was downtown when the attacks happened, watching the horror unfold. Police grabbed me, pushing me out of the train station, and I fled, hiding behind cars, shaking, and waiting to hear the shots with the people around me. Terrorist attacks occur in the US as well, at an alarming rate. 94% of these attacks are committed by non-Muslims, yet the media and our public outrage continue to focus on attacks committed by members of the Muslim community. Throughout the US and Europe we are witnessing policy-makers use these 6% of attacks, and fear-mongering techniques to justify Islamaphobic and xenophobic proposals. This plays into a cycle of discrimination, scapegoating, alienation, and violence with our wars abroad against predominantly Muslim countries and attacks of retaliation at home. Gun violence committed by members of the Muslim community is often driven and spurred by our Islamophobia.

Much of the gun violence prevention movement has responded by supporting and promoting an Islamophobic campaign, the No Fly No Buy legislation, which would prevent individuals who are on the FBI terrorist watch list from purchasing weapons. This list unfairly and indiscriminately targets innocent Muslim Americans. This campaign is bigoted and reductive and only fuels the hate that inspires attacks such as in Paris, Beirut, San Bernardino, and other cities. If we are serious about preventing gun violence, we need to ensure we are not isolating and discriminating against Muslim communities in America.

To respond to the intersectional and devastating nature of gun violence in America, it is necessary to listen to the experiences of all of our communities, including underrepresented groups such as black, brown, Latinx, immigrant, undocumented, LGBTQ, trans, veteran, and economically disadvantaged communities. Many of the currently proposed actions to lower gun violence rates do not address the specific issues of these communities. A strong example is the recent case of Alfred Olango, an unarmed African-American man with a seizure disorder who was killed by police in San Diego in September of this year. This man was not just a victim of the phenomenon of gun violence, but he was killed by racially unjust patterns of policing that do not value black lives, he was killed by the lack of adequate services available to those the US living with mental illness, he was killed by the oppression of low-income families in America, and he was killed by capitalist corporate greed that drove up the price of seizure medication to make it inaccessible to those without healthcare. The list goes on. If we are not addressing all of these oppressions and treating individuals as individuals within a flawed system, then we are not addressing gun violence. Millennials understand this.

It is time for an intersectional approach to gun violence prevention, in order to effectively keep all of our communities safe. A grassroots, millennial-led, effort is underway to discuss strategies available to counter the tide of gun violence. Strength in Synergy: An Intersectional Summit to End Gun Violence will bring together members and advocates from different communities and movements including gun violence prevention, LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter, immigrant rights, domestic violence prevention, Palestinian human rights, faith-based organizing, and others. The event is an all-day summit at American University in Washington D.C. on December 10th from 9:30am – 6:00pm, the conference is free and registration is available at this link. All are welcome to build a new, inclusive, movement for human rights, safety, and human dignity.